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LIGHT 



ON THE 



PILGRIM'S WAY: 



SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 



Rev. CHARLES A. STORK, D. D. 



EDITED, WITH A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE, BY HIS BROTHER, 

T. B. STORK. 




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APR J 188! 



PHILADELPHIA : 
LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY. 

1885. 



,37 



COPYRIGHT, 1885, 

BY I HE 

LUTHERAN PUBLICATION SOCIETY. 



PREFACE. 



When a man is traveling in the same direction, over 
the same road, beset with the same stumbling blocks 
and difficulties as ourselves, it is always helpful to hear 
from his own lips an account of his journeying, of his 
troubles, his perplexities, of what helped him, of what 
hindered him, and in general how he fared on his way. 

And this account of his experiences is all the more 
valuable, if the traveler in question have the gift of ob- 
serving and of truthfully telling to others the result of 
his observations. 

The writings of Dr. Charles A. Stork here collected, 
are nearly all of this practical every-day kind. They 
treat of the homely details of the Christian life such as 
all know in a way that reveals the writer's source of 
knowledge to have been in great part his own experi- 
ence in traveling along the Heavenly way. It is not 
unreasonable therefore to expect his writings to prove 
not merely interesting but helpful to those who like 
himself are set with their faces Heavenward. 

All his writings indeed are peculiarly rich in what 
(3) 



4 PREFACE. 

may be called individualized, personal teaching ; they 
are not mere formal didactic utterances, but the life-like 
expression of the real feelings of his own soul. He 
gave himself to his pupil in Divine things, and in his 
writings may be traced as truthfully as in a mirror, his 
own spiritual history. He gave to each one the bene- 
fit of the lessons he had himself learned from the Mas- 
ter. Such spiritual lessons faithfully taught have a 
value, a life, a reality that all must feel, and seem to 
justify the hope that they may truly be to the Heavenly 
Pilgrim a light on his way, and thus make good the 
title which has been chosen for them. 

Fully furnished as he was with theological learning, 
and inheriting something of his grandfather's facility 
in Greek and Latin letters, Dr. Stork had no fondness 
for learned discussions of abstruse points of doctrine ; he 
seems to have preferred to write of the practical every- 
day experiences and feelings of the Christian pilgrim. 
In so writing he seldom failed to invest common and 
apparently thread-bare subjects, with a freshness that 
was often surprising. This originality of treatment, 
while by its novelty adapted to awaken and arouse, 
was never suffered to go one step in the direction of 
the sensational or the theatrical. It was a healthy 
originality because it was true and natural. 

To this spiritual insight, suggestive and original as 



PREFACE. 5 

it was, he added no mean skill of a purely literary 
kind. What he had to say was said in the best way, 
gracefully, simply, pointedly. Any reference to his 
literary workmanship, however slight, would be in- 
complete if it failed to touch on the artistic feeling 
that showed itself not only in his published writings, 
but even more especially in his informal letters to his 
friends. His enjoyment of nature was of the keenest; 
the form of a cloud, the foliage of a tree, the delicate 
tint of the surf as it flowed over the sand; for all these 
he had the eye of a painter, and loved to descant upon 
them. Indeed it was a dream of his that with time 
and opportunity he could have painted pictures. His 
writings are full of vivid allusions to natural objects, 
and from them he drew some of his happiest illustra- 
tions. He rejoiced to wander in the open country and 
to feast his eyes upon the landscape. To him one of 
the great pleasures of his residence at Gettysburg, 
was the close communion with nature that it brought 
him. Walking along the country roads and over the 
wild hills in summer, or skating across the frozen 
ponds backed with the dark bare woods of winter, 
furnished him with unbounded enjoyment, and if any 
one happened to be with him, with a fund of suggest- 
ive remarks and delicately appreciative comments. 
Of the strictly intellectual quality of his work, little 



6 PREFACE. 

need be said to any who had even the most casual ac- 
quaintance with him. As of Burke, it might almost 
be said of him that one could not be caught with him 
under an arch-way in a shower without recognizing 
the originality of his mind. 

No matter what subject chanced to present itself, 
he generally had something to say upon it that was 
suggestive and stimulating to the thought of others. 
For whatever he said or wrote bore the marks of orig- 
inal thinking: he accepted no opinion or belief until he 
had made it his own, and saw it clearly and completely 
for himself. He did not look through other men's 
spectacles. To this gift of clear mental vision he added 
the still more precious gift of conferring that vision on 
others. Whether it were some weighty moral problem 
or only some pastoral beauty that attracted his atten- 
tion, whether it were a saying of St. Paul or only the 
flowing of a mountain stream over its pebbly bed, he 
could by a touch open the eyes of others to his own 
clear vision of it. In his conversation, however, while 
often instructive he was never copious ; he preferred the 
quiet company of his own thoughts to talking, and was 
seldom as frank and confidential in his utterance with 
his most intimate friends as with his pen and paper. 
His letters and writings reveal his individuality more 
clearly than any personal intercourse could. 



PREFACE. / 

For these reasons, therefore, it has been thought 
by his friends that a few selections from his writings 
might not be unacceptable as putting into the per- 
manent form of a book some of the suggestive 
articles which fell from his pen, either as sermons 
or as contributions to current church literature. 
Such selections thus collected serve a double purpose ; 
they are a slight memorial, and perchance they may 
comfort and console others long after those for whose 
especial comfort and consolation they were written 
are dead and gone. 

The matter which has been used in compiling this 
volume, has been drawn from three sources: first, 
from his unpublished sermons; secondly, from his ar- 
ticles contributed to The Lutheran Observer during the 
last ten years; and, thirdly, from articles published 
during about the same length of time in " The Luth- 
eran Quarterly." While the amount has not been 
great (owing partly to the fact that in preaching he 
usually used skeletons, and only wrote out in full a 
few of his sermons), the quality has been of such ex- 
cellence as to make the work of selection one of much 
nicety. Where any question has arisen preference has 
been given to the unpublished over the published 
writings, and where it was inconvenient to publish an 
article entire, extracts of what appeared best in it have 
been made and placed under the head either of Ex- 



8 PREFACE. 

tracts or of Scattered Thoughts, as the length and im- 
portance of the part extracted seemed to demand, the 
longer and more important being placed under the 
first title. 

It is proper here to mention that the work of selec- 
tion has been aided by the kindness of the proprietors 
of "The Lutheran Quarterly" and The Lutheran Ob- 
server, who furnished the compiler with almost com- 
plete sets of the back numbers of their respective 
publications. T. B. Stork. 

Fircote, January, 1885. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Sketch of Charles A. Stork 1 1 

Recollections of Charles A. Stork 29 

II. Selections 36-225 

Newman on Justification 36 

The Chinese Problem 7° 

The Secret of Christmas 96 

The Growing Life 101 

Christ's Method of Dealing With Men 106 

The Cure of Carefulness 131 

Eternal Life 146 

Bought with a Price 169 

Life a Probation 187 

Looking Unto Jesus 206 

III. Extracts 226-265 

St. Paul's Love for Men 226 

The Spirit of God 228 

Purpose in Life 232 

Letting Religion Slip 235 

The Fellowship of Christ's Sufferings 238 

Worship 243 

True Christian Patience 245 

The Scriptural View of Heaven 247 

The Main Hindrance to the Gospel . . , 249 

(9) 



10 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Abraham's Faith . 251 

Christ's Valuation of Men 252 

Consecration 254 

Christ's Knowledge and Love of Men 257 

Individuality through Christ 260 

IV. Scattered Thoughts 266-341 



CHARLES A. STORK, D. D. 



IjIS LIFE, 

Charles A. Stork came of a line of preachers. His 
grandfather, Carl August Gottlieb Storch, had been 
sent from Germany in the year 1788, as a missionary 
to the Lutheran Church in North Carolina, where he 
labored faithfully until his death in 183 1. He be- 
queathed his calling and his devotion to the ministry, 
together with his name Gottlieb (anglice Theophilus) 
to his youngest son, Theophilus Stork, who in his 
turn handed them down to his own eldest son, named 
after his grandfather, Charles Augustus Stork. 

He was born September 4, 1838, at the home of 
his maternal grandfather, William Lynch, in Frederick 
county, Maryland. Two years before, his father, 
coming from the Theological Seminary at Gettys- 
burg, Pennsylvania, had taken charge of the Lutheran 
church in Winchester, Virginia, and soon afterward 
had married Mary Jane Lynch, the oldest daughter of 
William Lynch, a substantial farmer of old Revolu- 
tionary stock, whose farm lay on the north side of the 

(") 



12 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

Potomac river, not far from the little town of Jefferson, 
Maryland. Winchester, Virginia, where his father's 
church then was, lay distant as the crow flies about 
thirty miles southwest from his grandfather Lynch's 
farm. 

In September, 1 841, when the "young" Charles was 
three years old, his father was called to the pastorate 
of St. Matthew's Lutheran church in the city of Phil- 
adelphia, where he was destined to spend the longest 
and most active period of his ministry. In August, 
1846, his mother died of consumption, leaving to her 
husband's care her two children, Charles, and his 
younger brother, William. It was about this time, 
and perhaps in consequence of her death, that Charles 
was for the first time sent off to school, to an academy 
kept by the Rev. Lewis Eichelberger, in Winchester, 
Virginia. He could read and write, and knew a little 
about figures at this time; but a young boy among 
strangers, he felt keenly, the loss of a mother's care 
and kindness, and the genial influences of home. Of 
his experience there, he himself says that his chief 
gain was a fine grounding in Latin. 

While a boy, he usually spent his summers on his 
grandfather's farm in Maryland. From the first he 
was of a quiet, studious turn, fonder of reading than 
of the outdoor sports of children. Often he would 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 1 3 

steal away from his playmates to an out-of-the-way 
nook, with some literary treasure that he had discov- 
ered, and would there pore over it at his leisure. 
His grandfather took in those days a paper called, 
" The New World," which was filled with serial stories 
and other like literary wares ; of this Charles was par- 
ticularly fond. It was his delight to take the back 
numbers of this upstairs with him, spread them out on 
the floor, and lying down beside them, give himself 
up for hours to their perusal. 

Having become sufficiently advanced in years and 
knowledge, he was sent to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 
to prepare himself for entering College, and later to 
Hartwick Seminary. At the latter place he came 
under the influence of Dr. Irving Magee, now of 
Rondout, New York, who was his Bible-class teacher. 
To a few words, fitly spoken by him after one of the 
cottage prayer-meetings at Hartwick, Charles attri- 
buted under God his conversion. From Hartwick 
Seminary he passed to Williams College, entering the 
class of 1857. Here he found himself one of the 
youngest and smallest boys in the institution, and 
perhaps, partly for this reason, a general favorite. 
During his collegiate course he was thrown in espe- 
cial intimacy with Horace E. Scudder, the litterateur, 
with Dr. Irving Magee, his old Hartwick friend, with 



14 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

James A. Garfield, and with Henry M. Alden, the 
latter of whom has furnished for this volume a short 
account of his life there and at Andover Theological 
Seminary. These intimacies were kept alive as far as 
circumstances of time and place would permit, during 
the whole of his subsequent life. 

Young as he was, however, while pursuing his* 
studies, he had not omitted to form plans and dream 
dreams of the future, and at one time he had thought 
of the law as a profession. But with such a lineage 
it is not difficult to understand how this idea faded 
away as he grew older, and how naturally he began 
to turn his thoughts toward that calling which, to the 
earnest piety of his father and his grandfather, was 
the most glorious possible. On this point his father 
says, in one of his letters written to him when the crit- 
ical time of decision was drawing near: "In regard 
to your studying for the ministry, you know my sen- 
timents; you know it would afford me the greatest 
satisfaction, and that no earthly honors, in any sphere 
of human station, would be as grateful to me as to see 
you a devoted and respectable and useful minister of 
Christ. But then you must be influenced not by any 
desire simply to gratify me." 

All the letters from home to him, while pursuing 
his studies at Hartwick and Williams, are filled with 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 1 5 

similar expressions. In one his father writes : " I 
would rather be the humblest minister in the land to 
preach the Gospel to perishing sinners, * * * one 
soul won to Christ and heaven is worth more than all 
the world ; beside which the honors and wealth of the 
world are but weeds and rags." 

Interspersed with these earnest exclamations, that 
came from the deepest feelings of his father's heart, 
voicing the great abiding principles of his life, were 
bits of homely detail that showed this all-pervading 
belief in the sacredness of his calling to be no mere 
feeling, but the realized experience of his life. In 
these little domestic details, casually referred to in his 
letters to his son, may be seen how sharply at times 
he realized that he was himself sacrificing earthly ease 
and comfort to that calling of preaching the gospel to 
perishing sinners ; and that the res angustce domi were 
by no means unknown to him and his household. 

It was while a student at Williams, that Charles 
took the final step, and made up his mind to study for 
the ministry. From this time his father's letters are 
filled with plans for his taking his place, and letter 
after letter refers to the pleasure his father feels in an- 
ticipating his assisting him in pastoral duties, which 
were fast becoming too heavy to be borne alone. For 
while Charles had been progressing in due course 



1 6 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

through school and college, some very important 
changes had been taking place at home. St. Mat- 
thew's, the church to which his father had come in 
1 841, was an old well-established Lutheran congrega- 
tion, worshipping in a plain substantial building in 
New street, east of Fourth. As time rolled on it be- 
came evident, by reason of the fast encroaching busi- 
ness of the city, and the equally rapid movement of 
the population westward, that not only would a new 
church westward of the present site, and nearer their 
dwellings, be acceptable to many of the congregation, 
but that the growth of the city westward would afford 
a wide field for missionary work, and for the in-gather- 
ing of new members. Accordingly, in the year 1850, 
a new church had been organized by some of the 
members of St. Matthew's congregation, and under 
the name of St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran church, 
was duly planted at the southwest corner of Thirteenth 
and Spring Garden streets. His father had felt it to 
be his duty, as it was his earnest desire, to accompany 
the new congregation and to assist as its pastor in the 
arduous undertaking of establishing itself. The hard 
work and anxiety entailed by his pastorate of St. 
Mark's, told on a constitution that had never been 
robust ; and although crowned with success, and see- 
ing his work prospering as highly as he could hope, 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. \J 

he again and again felt himself on the point of being 
compelled to relinquish it to others. But he struggled 
on, buoyed up with the one hope that his son Charles 
might eventually be able to assist him in his pastoral 
duties. Occasionally his feelings would escape in his 
letters in some such exclamation as : " O, how I wish 
you were through, and could be associated with me — 
it would be a good school for you, and a great relief 
to me. Go on: perhaps I can, by God's blessing, hold 
on till you are ready to assist me." 

After completing his collegiate course at Williams, 
in 1857, Charles went with his closest friend and class- 
mate, Alden, to Andover, Massachusetts, to pursue a 
two years' course in Theology at the Seminary there. 
Of his student life here, as well as at Williams, suffi- 
cient has been said by his friend Alden in his recol- 
lections; but one incident of his stay at Andover 
may be added as illustrating a strongly characteristic 
trait, his love of and sensibility to natural beauty. It 
seems that during one of his vacations, he tried the 
boyish adventure of camping out in the woods; but 
being, as he himself confesses, no great woodsman, he 
met with indifferent success. In a letter to his father 
he says that he was wet to the skin with rain, he knew 
not how to cook the fish he caught, and was very glad 
to return to civilization, scorched by fire and sun, and 



1 8 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

with bruised legs and blistered hands. " There is one 
thing," he adds, " I learned, however, that was worth 
it all, and that is the grandeur and solemnity of soli- 
tude in the night. I used to lie and listen to the lap- 
ping of the waters on the shores of the lake, and the 
moaning of the winds in the forest, and look at the 
stars shining so silently and steadily, until I was really 
oppressed with the solemnity of the solitary night; 
* * * there are many things a man may learn from 
nature, if he will; * * * I get sometimes an over- 
powering sense of the careful and continual working 
of God through all these scenes of nature. It seems 
like standing in his very presence, to watch the 
changes and all the movement of a strong summer 
day, for it sets before us his immediate workings for 
us and to us." 

Before Charles was fully prepared to give to his 
father that assistance in pastoral work at St. Mark's 
for which he was anxiously waiting, an invitation 
came which seemed to offer relief in a different way. 
In the latter part of the year 1858, Dr. Stork was 
offered the presidency of the Lutheran college at 
Newberry, South Carolina, a new institution just es- 
tablished there. For several reasons the offer was in- 
viting : the work would be much lighter than that of 
preaching and pastoral labor in! a congregation so 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 1 9 

large as St. Mark's had grown to be, while the warmer 
climate of the South seemed exactly calculated to re- 
store health to one who, like Dr. Stork, was suffering 
from weakness of the throat and lungs. 

His father, being still anxious to have Charles asso- 
ciated with him in his work, asked him to become a 
teacher in the new College. All preliminaries having 
been satisfactorily settled, father and son, in the follow- 
ing year (1859), entered upon their duties at New- 
berry, the one as president, the other as professor of 
Greek. The civil war put an end to their labors in a 
little less than a year after they had begun, and 
Charles, whose sight had been injured by too close 
application to crabbed Greek texts, went abroad to 
consult Dr. Von Graeffe, of Berlin. This great ocu- 
list effectually restored his eyesight after a treatment 
of some six months. Returning to the United States 
he took charge, for some months, of St. James' Luth- 
eran mission, in the city of Philadelphia. Meanwhile 
his father had undertaken the task of building up a 
new St. Mark's, in the city of Baltimore. This, like its 
namesake and predecessor in Philadelphia, was an off- 
shoot of an older church, and Dr. Stork was its first 
pastor. At his instance and desire, Charles A. Stork 
was called by the congregation to be his assistant. 
Here he spent the best years of his life and the whole 



20 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

of his active ministry, the few months in Philadelphia 
excepted. Shortly after coming to Baltimore he mar- 
ried Miss Maria H. Ellis, of Andover, Massachusetts. 
He continued to preach and labor at St. Mark's for 
twenty years, first as pastor, assisting his father, and 
afterwards, on the resignation of his father in 1865, as 
sole pastor of the church. 

At first his preaching was characterized by its ana- 
lytic and scholarly elements, rather than by those 
qualities of sympathy and warmth of feeling which 
made the peculiar charm of his father in the pulpit. 
But his growth in spirituality was constant. When, 
on the resignation of his father in 1865, he assumed 
sole charge of St. Mark's, the new and greater respon- 
bility, which he keenly appreciated, drove him to a 
deeper and stronger reliance on God, and led him to 
seek for sustenance in a closer communion with him. 

Like his father, it was his lot to bear the constant 
burden of a weak and delicate body; as early as 1 870 
he had received a warning of his failing health ; dur- 
ing that summer he was taken ill, and only became 
convalescent in time to resume his duties in the 
autumn. From that time it seemed as though the 
"shadow feared of man" was ever casting itself on his 
path. He recovered his health, but the precious gift was 
only to be kept by him at the price of continual care. 



SKETCH OE HIS LIFE. 21 

In 1874 he was advised by his physicians that his 
lungs were affected, and, in pursuance of their direc- 
tions, he spent the winter in Egypt. He returned 
much improved, and took up his work at St. Mark's 
with fresh hope and strength. But the improvement, 
as he himself more than suspected, was only a post- 
poning of the end that was slowly yet surely ap- 
proaching. What an effect this prospect had upon 
him, may be traced not only in his public utterances, 
but even more distinctly in his private correspon- 
dence. It was the purifying of the gold in the fur- 
nace of affliction. The tenderness, the sympathy, the 
spiritual insight that are so marked in his later writ- 
ings, were doubtless the fruit of that mighty spiritual 
chastener — physical suffering. No one can read those 
sermons of his, such as The Fellowship of Christ's 
Sufferings, True Christian Patience, and the like, and 
not feel that they were drawn from the writer's own 
experience, that he knew in his own soul whereof he 
spoke. Not that his life was one of acute suffering: 
often he enjoyed apparently robust health, but then a 
slight exposure, a spell of unusually hard work, 
would bring him down with a sharp reminder that 
could not be ignored in the shape of a cough or a 
sore throat. Then for weeks he would be compelled 
to discontinue preaching, and to suffer in a dull, irri- 



22 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

tating way that was more depressing to the spirit than 
sharp pain. After such an attack in the spring of 
1877, he writes: 

" I have been suffering with my throat ever since I 
was in Philadelphia. You will remember I had a 
cough then. Well, it got worse, and I have not 
preached for a month till last Sunday. I tried one 
sermon then. But it threw me back. The doctor 
says it will be a tedious affair. Possibly I may be 
laid up for the summer. I have no pain, but only 
a loss of voice. My cough, which was quite bad, is 
nearly all gone ; now I must wait for strength to come 
back. * * * * 

" But the long continuance of the weakness is begin- 
ning to make me feel a little depressed. I suppose I 
am to struggle as did father ; now able to preach, 
then laid up. But the doctor tells me it is nothing; 
if only we could fully trust the doctors. * * * We 
shall have a pleasant and profitable summer; that is, if 
I do not get too much depressed about my throat. I 
know we ought to be cheerful and take gladly any- 
thing God sends, but a weight of melancholy seems to 
press on me sometimes, and though I am not rebel- 
lious, I do feel sad. 

" Perhaps God means us to be sad. It may be good 
for us to be made to feel weak and dependent. I am 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 23 

sure I inherit from father something of a tendency to 
be melancholy at times." 

Later in the same year he writes more cheerfully : 
" I am feeling very strong and able to work ; I rejoice 
in the strength, and want to use it for the best while 
I have it, knowing that when the days of weakness 
come, as they must come to all, then God will give 
me just as perfect peace and satisfaction in weakness, 
as I have now in strength." 

Every year of his later life added greatly to his 
duties and his responsibilities ; every year he seemed 
to become more conspicuous in the general work of 
the Lutheran church, and this in the most natural 
way without any seeking upon his own part, but 
simply from the fact that for many positions he was 
found peculiarly fitted, and always willing whatever 
his strength might be. It was his desire to be spent 
in the Lord's service. Thus he was made President 
of the Board of Foreign Missions, an onerous and re- 
sponsible post which he filled to the entire satisfaction 
of the church. In connection with this he partly 
edited and wrote for a mission paper, the Missionary 
Journal. Pie contributed frequently to the Lutlieran 
Quarterly and the Lutlieran Observer. In addition to 
this for several terms he lectured to the students of 
Pennsylvania College on History, going up from Balti- 



24 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

more to Gettysburg at stated times for the purpose. 
He was also elected GraefT Professor of English Lan- 
guage and Literature in the same institution : this he 
declined, since it would have compelled him to give 
up his church, which he was loth to do. 

In 1 88 1 he was elected Professor of Didactic Theo- 
logy at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettys- 
burg, Pa. In October of that year he left Baltimore, 
and the church where he had labored for twenty years, 
and to which he was warmly attached, and took up his 
residence on Seminary Ridge, in Gettysburg, there to 
enter upon the duties of his professorship. His re- 
gret at leaving St. Mark's, and with it the active min- 
istry was deep, but he felt that the call to teach theo- 
logy was God's, and he went willingly. He was learn- 
ing every year to look more directly to God for each 
step in life. 

" The secret of peace, I find, is not success," he 
writes at this time, " nor activity, but humility and the 
secret of humility is the vision and felt presence of 
God; when we see him we are at once humbled, cast 
down from self and men and also exalted with the 
fullness of the Divine indwelling. Some will call this 
mysticism; and I suppose it is; but I would wish to 
be such a mystic as St. Paul when he said, ' I live, 
yet not I but Christ liveth in me/ yes, there is a 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 25 

mystic element in the Christian life : you know 
mystic means ' hidden' and there is something ' hid- 
den' in the new life. That is what St. Paul meant 
when he said your life is hid with Christ in God." 

But let no one suppose that teaching was distasteful 
to him ; he had a rare gift for imparting knowledge 
and could, by an apt illustration, often throw a flood 
of light upon some dark point; he therefore thoroughly 
enjoyed the work at Gettysburg ; but he had his father's 
love of the ministry and was often glad to vary his 
labors by preaching when occasion offered. At the 
close of his first year's work in the Seminary he 
writes : 

" I am glad my first year's work is nearly over. 
It ends June 25th. It has been quite hard for me 
making lectures on new subjects. I have been kept 
too close in my study. But the summer vacation 
will mend that; and next year I shall not be pressed 
so hard. 

I hope I am doing good here; but I find in doing 
work for the Lord, as in all the Christian life, we must 
walk by faith, not by sight. We cannot see always 
that we are really accomplishing anything. The only 
way I find is to live day by day, being sure the Lord 
has given us a certain work to do, and then doing it, 
even though we cannot see the fruit. I preached 



26 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

yesterday on Mary's words at the feast at Cana, 
' Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.' How simple 
and beautiful that rule is ; to take our work from his 
lips, our particular work whatever it is and then faith- 
fully and loyally to do it just because he says it." 

But the period of his usefulness on earth was not to 
be much longer continued. His old troubles re- 
vived, his throat primarily and his lungs in a less de- 
gree began once more to distress him. It is not cer- 
tain what exactly was the predisposing cause, it was 
thought perhaps a visit he paid to Baltimore to attend 
a meeting upon some church business, was the imme- 
diate occasion of his last illness. It was a winter's 
day, and he returned late at night to his home in a 
blinding snow storm. The cold he then took aggra- 
vated the disease; which, however, must long ere that 
have fixed its seat in his throat and lungs. This 
finally brought about his death from phthisis laryn- 
gitis, on the morning of Monday, December 17, 1883, 
in Philadelphia, whither he had gone for medical 
advice and treatment. 

His letters at this time and while the issue was still 
uncertain, are pathetic ; in one he says : " I feel in my- 
self a greater desire to communicate good, a greater 
richness of thought and experience to communicate ; 
and then to lie still, to be shut up in silence is a hard 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE. 2J 

trial. But God knows best. When I feel restive, im- 
patient, weary, despondent, I just fold my hands and 
say over those words of Jesus : ' Thy will be done/ 
till I feel how blessed that will is, and all the waves 
of strife in me go down, and a heavenly peace comes 
in. I was reading yesterday the words of Adolph 
Monod, repeated so often in the last months of his life, 
when he was suffering so much : ' The crucified life 
is the blessed life.' " 

Again he writes : " My throat improves slowly, but 
very slowly. I am having a thorough lesson in. pa- 
tience. I think sometimes I have had enough, but the 
Master says, No, you must go over the old lesson 
again. * * * * 

" I reproach myself often since my weakness and 
sickness have been so heavy on me, that I do not 
praise God more for the sunshine he pours so abun- 
dantly on me in it all." 

As he draws near those gates of Death, so awful in 
their mystery, but to him so glorious in their possi- 
bility, he seems to gain a fresh and wondrous vision 
of spiritual things. He writes as if already the light 
of another world, of heaven, were illuminating the dark 
problems of earth, and as if he saw all things trans- 
figured in that radiance. " The Christian," he says in 
one of his letters, " is not complete in Christ until not 



28 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

only he has received Christ as crucified for him, but 
is also crucified with him. That, I think, is a very 
deep and, though at first sight, a repelling, yet when 
we experience it, a very precious truth of our holy 
faith. To die to self, to be baptized in suffering, to re- 
ceive the strokes of God, and so to rise in Christ and 
to be one with him — that to me of late is growing 
more and more a rich part of the faith." 

While the death of such a man in the very ripeness 
of his Christian life, when fully prepared to serve 
Christ and his church most effectively seems mys- 
terious to our earthly vision, yet in one of his letters 
he has himself suggested a solution of the mystery 
that may be allowed as his own epitaph to close this 
brief sketch : 

" I believe I am one who is destined never to have 
any great success, nor any great failure. I jog along 
the foot-path way. I can't say but that I would like 
to have something more stirring and marked, a great 
crowd to preach to, many and striking conversions, 
large achievements. But if I am to do ordinary work 
in a quiet way, I hope to be satisfied. I was much 
struck lately by a remark made in the Spectator apro- 
pos of the life of a good man who with many op- 
portunities and some fine gifts, yet failed of his chief 
project for doing good, and passed away depressed by 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A FELLOW STUDENT. 29 

the thought that he had achieved very little. His 
character, however, was greatly chastened and ripened 
as he grew old and the reviewer says his friends at 
last recognized in his life that the highest end of exis- 
tence is neither to shine nor achieve, but to do the Di- 
vine will. That after all is the deepest truth; we fall 
back on that when all else fails — that we cannot be 
disappointed of — being one with Christ in accepting 
and accomplishing God's will." 



RECOLLECTIONS OF CARLES JJ. STORK, 



BY A FELLOW-STUDENT. 

He was my class-mate at Williams College, and 
afterward, at the Andover Theological Seminary; but 
we had nearly completed our Junior year at college 
before we became intimate friends — and up to that 
time I knew perhaps less of him than of any other of 
my fellow-students. Considering our near and con- 
stant intercourse during the following years, this is 
somewhat remarkable, and it illustrates a peculiarity 
of his character. He probably never did anything in 
his whole life with the purpose of drawing attention to 
himself. He entered into no competition with his fel- 
lows. With unusual power of expression, both as a 



30 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

writer and as a speaker, he showed no desire for such 
expression. He had no outward eccentricity; and 
even his indifference to passing affairs was negative 
rather than positive, and escaped observation. He was 
reticent without shyness, and, whatever may have been 
his inner life, he gave no outward sign of it. 

In all that makes up the visible exterior of a man 
he was the same from the first to the last observation 
I had of him. When he entered college, he had in 
all these respects reached maturity, although he was 
almost the youngest member of his class. 

Though not inviting notice, there were some pecu- 
liarities in his personal appearance that would arrest 
the attention of even a casual observer. His features 
— as large as those we note in the portraits of Beeth- 
oven — clearly indicated his Teutonic paternity; while 
his mobile mouth, his small hands — as delicate as a 
woman's — and the sensitiveness that inter-penetrated 
his German phlegm, as clearly showed that his mother 
was of the finer Southern type. His mood was that 
of habitual thoughtfulness, usually contemplative, but, 
under excitement, lambent with fire and humor. 

His intellectual habits and tastes were, even at 
that early period, fully formed. He had read all the 
great books of our literature, and his literary taste was 
almost an instinct. He especially appreciated authors 



RECOLLECTONS OF A FELLOW STUDENT. 3 1 

in whom humor was a prominent characteristic ; but 
his taste was catholic, and he delighted in the keen 
humor of Thackeray, as well as in the broad caricature 
of Dickens. In history, he read those works which 
interpreted the great drama of human progress, caring 
little for those which contained annals only. The 
early English poets were as familiar to him as the later. 
I approach, with some difficulty, the period of our 
nearer acquaintance. The memory of such a friend- 
ship is too sacred for expression, except in the lofty 
strains of a new " In Memoriam." It was the ideal 
friendship of my life, and its preciousness to me may 
be understood from the fact that at that time I had no 
other intimate friend. It was characteristic of his gen- 
erous nature that he sought to draw me out of the 
solitude in which I had immured myself. He had 
few intimate personal friends. Among them were 
James A. Garfield, of the class of '56, and Horace E. 
Scudder, of the class of '57. Garfield's graduation was 
near at hand. I remember his last evening at Wil- 
liams, when a number of us joined hands with him on 
the college green and sang"Auld Lang Syne." Scud- 
der was especially congenial to Stork, not only because 
of their intellectual sympathy, but because each of 
them had a pure, sweet and wholesome nature — the 
natural basis of a manly and lasting friendship. 



32 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

But one year of college life remained to Stork and 
myself, and we embraced every opportunity such as 
friends always seek for intercourse, much of our time 
being spent in reading together our favorite authors. 
Of modern writers, the poet Tennyson made the 
strongest impression upon our minds. His thought 
— moulded after the antique, mediaeval, or modern type 
— was at once poetic and interpretative. His wonder- 
ful rhythm and classic perfection of form gave aesthetic 
satisfaction. And we found in his poems sympathy 
with currents of modern thought into which we were 
drifting — especially that of "honest doubt." The 
studies of the senior year were largely of a speculative 
character, and, since these were pursued under the 
guidance of Dr. Mark Hopkins, it is needless to add 
that they developed independent thinking. 

But our talk was not wholly of books and meta- 
physics; and it is worthy of note here that Stork 
loved to talk about his home and about the members 
of his family — always in terms of the deepest affec- 
tion. While then, and always, I was impressed by his 
sincerity, fidelity and earnestness, I could not but 
notice his disposition to indulge in playful humor. 
His dignity was natural, without any stiffness or self- 
consciousness. He was always companionable, and 
no classmate was more popular than he was. 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A FELLOW STUDENT. 33 

Among his writings at that time I remember partic- 
ularly an essay on Rhythm, which was published in 
the Williams Quarterly, and which displayed not only 
his extensive reading in English poetry, but also a crit- 
ical ability of the highest order, because it was inter- 
pretative and sympathetic, as well as keen in analysis. 
But, as a promise of his literary future, a brief essay, 
entitled "Winter," written, I believe, while he was 
preparing for college at Hartwick Seminary, made a 
stronger and more lasting impression upon my mind. 
His winter landscape was associated with Shake- 
speare's King Lear. Nature was more to him than 
books, but its charms were, in his mind, inseparably 
connected with the creations of the master poets. He 
was himself a poet, having much of the virility and 
dramatic power that distinguish the works of Robert 
Browning; but he modestly regarded what hie did in 
this field as studies made for his own satisfaction 
rather than as having any claim to public recognition. 

In his entire college career I can recall but a single 
instance of any public expression on his part. It was 
at a meeting of the faculty, students, and friends of 
the College, in recognition of some important bene- 
faction, and he had been chosen as a speaker to repre- 
sent his class. He had written nothing for recitation ; 
but, when he came to speak, it was evident that he 



34 REV. C. A. STORK, D. D. 

had let his subject take full possession of his mind, 
and his address was natural in manner, thoughtful, 
eloquent and impressive. 

A few months after graduation we entered the 
Theological Seminary at Andover. He had reached 
the period when youth forecasts for itself a lofty 
career. It is not necessary here to indicate the plans 
we formed. Was there ever youthful aspiration that 
did not grandly shape the dream of the future — a 
dream never to be realized? The student lives in a 
world of his own — a world in which nothing seems 
impossible. He will probably do little of all that be 
then so vastly determines. He soon enters another 
world, in which duty takes the place of aspiration, 
and, if he follows this new guide, he finds later on 
that the work really undertaken and accomplished is, 
after all, greater than his early dream. Yet I am 
sure that neither of us ever afterward regretted the 
studies — in Greek literature, in the History of Philoso- 
phy, and the Philosophy of History — that occupied us 
at the Seminary. If, in connection with these studies, 
the spirit and the active exercise of doubt were devel- 
oped, they were naturally incident to the intellectual 
period upon which we had entered. All discords 
were afterward resolved. Until the component parts 
of the mind's object-glass are fitly joined together, 



RECOLLECTIONS OF A FELLOW STUDENT. 35 

there must be mental aberration. But those who read 
the selections from Stork's writings contained in this 
volume will find there no indication of such aberra- 
tion. It will be clear to the reader that — whatever 
mental struggles he may have passed through, after 
the conflict his Saviour remained to him the one great 
real presence of his life. 

I can add nothing to this sketch that is not told 
elsewhere in this volume. I have attempted simply to 
draw a portrait of my friend, as he appeared to me 
during that uneventful but important period of his 
student life which is included within my own personal 
recollection. 

New York, August nth, 1884. H. M. A. 



SELECTIONS. 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION.* 

It has often occurred to the writer to ask how it 
happens that a theologian so distinguished as he 
whose name is written above should be so little known, 
so seldom referred to. Surely, whether for intrinsic 
ability, or for interest arising from a striking individual 
history, there are few names in the Church of this cen- 
tury that can outrank that of John Henry Newman. 

One reason for this comparative obscurity in the 
theological world may be that his writings, in the 
main, have not been in those lines which attract gen- 
eral notice. For a man may have great powers and 
exercise them greatly, and yet, if he write in a discur- 
sive manner, or suffer his strength to play about many 
subjects rather than fix itself upon one, he will, de- 
spite his greatness, be passed by unregarded. The 
world is intensely interested in every age on a few cer- 
tain fixed points, and anxious to have light thrown on 
these; and he who can bring the desired light is con- 
spicuous in the public eye, not he who shows the 

* Lectures on the Doctrine of Justification. By John Henry New- 
man. Sometime fellow of Oriel College. Third edition. Riving- 
tons: London, Oxford and Cambridge. MDCCCLXXiv. 

(.36) 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 37 

greatest power. It is an immensely practical world, 
and rewards him who can best speak the word it 
wants, not him who speaks the best word. Thus it is 
that De Quincey, though of incomparable power as a 
master of English prose, and a critic of the first order, 
is known only to the few, because he trifles gracefully 
with a score of subjects, none of them popular, while 
men of half his power and knowledge get a full 
audience by speaking to the point in hand. 

But even this would hardly account for the neglect 
of an author who counts among his productions a 
work so prolonged and exhaustive as that which we 
have taken for the subject-matter of this paper. There 
are works upon the Doctrine of Justification of greater 
bulk, but few that contain more matter, and none, we 
may make bold to say, in which the theme is handled 
with more vigor or originality. 

A few words as to the origin of the work, and we 
proceed to consider its character and merits. 

The Thirteen Lectures and Appendix of which it 
consists, were first published in 1838. They were 
written under the influence of that wave of doctrinal 
tendency which produced what is known as the Oxford 
or Tractarian party in the English Church, and which 
gave to the modern Church Keble, and Pusey and 
their fellows. It was intended, says the author in the 
advertisement to this, the third edition, to be one " of 
a series of works projected in illustration of what has 
often been considered to be the characteristic position 
of the Anglican Church, as lying in a supposed Via 



38 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Media, admitting much and excluding much both of 
Roman and of Protestant teaching." 

That this Via Media, which it was Dr. Newman's 
purpose to illustrate, lay very far over toward the 
Roman side of the controversy, will become apparent 
to any one who reads the third edition of our author's 
treatise and notes how few, how very few, changes he 
as Romish priest has found occasion to make in that 
which he wrote thirty-seven years ago as an Anglican 
clergyman. This he substantially acknowledges him- 
self: "Unless the author held in substance in 1874, 
what he published in 1838, he would not at this time 
be re-printing what he wrote as an Anglican; certainly 
not with so little added by way of safeguard.-" 

This, then, we may take to be a view of the doctrine 
of Justification as seen from the stand-point of Rome; 
or, perhaps, better still, as seen by one who is nearing 
Rome, but yet at that distance which enables him to 
look down on her position, as well as that of her an- 
tagonist, and discern with friendly criticism what in 
her ground is weak and therefore to be amended. 

To some the time and thought given to the careful 
consideration of a work of this character, may seem so 
much strength wasted. For three reasons it seems to 
the present writer quite otherwise. 

First, because if Burke is right in his aphorism that 
" Our antagonist is our helper" then it is a positive ser- 
vice to learn what one of the most powerful and sin- 
cere of those who have attacked the Protestant position 
respecting this doctrine can say against it. 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 39 

And, again, because it is no small intellectual 
pleasure, as well as a profitable study, to witness the 
dialectical skill of a master of theological controversy, 
probably the most skillful that the Church of this cen- 
tury has produced. When most thoroughly dissent- 
ing from its conclusions, the present writer has been 
most charmed with the powerful reasoning, the orig- 
inal method, the felicitous skill with which the argu- 
ment of this work is conducted. To be most charmed 
when one's cherished opinions are most powerfully 
attacked, surely this is the highest compliment one 
can pay his antagonist. And this testimony the 
stoutest defender of Luther cannot withhold from this 
work. 

And, lastly, because here we' have theology imbued 
with the loftiest, purest piety. Whatever Dr. Newman 
may or may not be, neither friend nor foe has ever 
held him in other esteem than as the most sincere and 
devout of Christian men. His is a piety that fuses the 
intellect; so that the reproach of theology, that it 
brings down the discussion of religion from heaven, 
and makes it of the earth earthy, can never attach to 
him. When most polemic, he is still the devout and 
humble believer. The head never paralyzes the heart. 
And the most thorough and subtle discussion of knotty 
questions does, with him, but bring fuel to the flame 
of devotion, food for solemn and heavenly meditations. 

But without further preface, to address ourselves to 
the work itself: 

% The author sums up his position with reference to 
the doctrine discussed in the following terse passage: 



40 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

4< In asking, then, what is our righteousness, I do 
not mean what is its original source, for this is God's 
mercy ; nor what is its meritorious cause, for this is the 
life, and above all the death of Christ; nor what is the 
instrument of it, for this (I would maintain) is Holy 
Baptism ; nor what is the entrance into it, for this is 
regeneration; nor what the first privilege of it, for this 
is pardon ; nor what is the ultimate fruit, for this is 
everlasting life." (p. 132.) 

Here, then, we find the point of our author's diver- 
gence from the Protestant doctrine; it is on the ques- 
tion, What is the instrumental cause in justification? 
What he means by the instrumental cause he defines 
farther, elsewhere: 

"Justification, the work of God, is brought into ef- 
fect through a succession of the following causes : the 
mercy of God the efficient cause, Christ offered on the 
Cross the meritorious, Baptism the instrumental, and 
the principle of renewal in righteousness thereby com- 
municated the formal ; upon which immediately follows 
justification." (p. 343.) 

This "principle of renewal" constituting the 'for- 
mal cause," communicated in Baptism as an instru- 
ment, he still farther defines as the Presence of Christ 
in us. 

" Christ then is our Righteousness by dwelling in 
us by the Spirit: he justifies us by entering into us. 
He continues to justify us by remaining in us. This 
is really and truly our justification, not faith; not holi- 
ness, not (much less) a mere imputation ; but through 
God's mercy the very Presence of Christ." 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 4 1 

Here, then, we have a sufficiently clear and full 
view of what in our author's judgment constitutes jus- 
tification. That which constitutes a man righteous in 
God's sight, that which makes a justified person to dif- 
fer from one not justified, the distinctive state of the 
soul to which the designation righteous belongs and 
which is the criterion within us, which God sees there, 
and is the seal and signature of his elect, which he 
accepts now, which he will acknowledge at the last 
day, what is it? The Protestant says, it is faith; our 
author says, no, it is Christ our Righteousness. This 
last is not a new answer. Indeed, he would be the last 
to claim that he had introduced here anything novel, 
holding, as those of his school do, that novelty is one 
mark of departure from the rule of Catholic antiquity, 
which also is the rule of faith in the interpretation of 
Scripture. In many respects this view is like that of 
A. Osiander; whom, indeed, our author cites as on his 
side, as one who maintains " that the formal cause of 
our justification is somethig in us, and therefore that it 
is the essential righteousness of Christ as God dwelling 
in us." (p. 388.) 

It is not our purpose, in this paper, to enter the old 
lists, and fight over again the battles of the Reformed 
Theology with Rome. That ground has been suf- 
ficiently traversed. Furthermore, our author himself 
disclaims the bald view of justification by obedience, 
as cold and open to the charge " that it views the in- 
fluence of grace, not as the operation of a living God, 
but as a something to bargain about, and buy, and traf- 



42 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

fie with, as if religion were not an approach to things 
above us, but a commerce with our equals concerning 
things we can master." It is true, he attacks the 
Protestant positions with even more evident repug- 
nance to them than he shows to the error of Rome. 
Luther's doctrinal teaching on this point he declares 
to be erroneous and even unintelligible. This he ar- 
gues at length and with great subtlety, but we leave 
this part of the subject. We prefer to point out those 
features in his work in which we agree to some extent 
with his conclusions, or in which at least we find his 
strictures profitable for the correction of the errors of 
Protestantism or rather the narrow forms that Protes- 
testantism has taken on in these latter days. 

The point to which we would call attention is our 
author's declaration that the difference between Romish 
and Protestant divines on justification is only verbal; a 
difference that has, indeed, issued in very important 
practical results, but that in itself is not radical, funda- 
mental. This he repeats again and again thus : 

" The drift of these lectures is to show that there is 
little difference but what is verbal in the various views on 
justification, found whether among Catholic or Protes- 
tant divines ; by Protestant being meant Lutheran, Cal- 
vinistic, and thirdly that dry anti-evangelical doctrine, 
which was dominant in the Church of England during 
the last century, (p. ix.) 

Again : 

" The cardinal question to be considered by Catholics 
and Protestants in their controversy about justification 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 43 

is, What is its formal cause ? When this is properly ex- 
amined, it will be found that there is little or no dif- 
ference of views between the disputants, except when 
the Protestant party adheres to the paradox of Luther : 
'sola fides, non fides formata cliaritate justificat] and 
refuses to assign a formal cause." (p. 343.) 

And once more: 

"The modern controversy on the subject of justifi- 
cation is not a vital one, inasmuch as all parties are 
agreed that Christ is the sole justifier, and that he 
makes those holy whom He justifies." (p. 400.) 

Is this, then, true? Is there no difference between 
saying, "I am justified by the presence and indwelling 
'of Christ as the formal cause of my justification/ and 
saying, ' I am justified by Faith apprehending Christ's 
righteousness and surrendering the soul to God ?' Is 
it all one to say with the Romanist ' I am accepted 
because I am righteous,' and to say with the Prot- 
estant, ' I am accepted because I am accounted right- 
eous?' Put in this way, neither Romanist nor Prot- 
estant would admit that the difference was merely 
verbal. There is an actual difference between the two 
doctrines; and that difference appears in the results 
the two views produce in the lives of those who are 
respectively moulded by them. To teach men that 
their righteousness has any part in obtaining accept- 
ance for them with God has resulted, as a rule, in 
leading them to trust in themselves for salvation. It 
has increased vain confidence in the careless, and 
caused perplexity and anguish in those who are care- 



44 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

ful and conscientious. These are mere truisms in the 
mouth of a Protestant. But they are not only the 
conclusions at which Protestants have arrived. Our 
author bears testimony to this himself: 

" When you teach as follows, that Christ's Atoning 
Death, eighteen hundred years since, and our own 
personal Baptism in our infancy, so changed our state 
in God's sight once for all, that henceforth salvation 
depends on ourselves, on our doing our part in the 
Covenant, true as all this is to the letter, yet if nothing 
more is added, we shall seem, in spite of whatever we 
say concerning the Atonement and the influences of 
the Holy Ghost if duly sought, to be resting a man's 
salvation on himself, and to be making him the centre 
of the whole religious system. I would not say that 
this doctrine will so affect men of high religious attain- 
ments ; but that viewed as the multitude will view it, 
it does not come up to the idea of the Gospel Creed 
as contained in Scripture, does not fix our thoughts on 
Christ in that full and direct way of which Scripture 
sets the pattern. This seems to be the real mean- 
ing of the popular saying that ' Christ ought to be 
preached.'" (pp. 185, 186.) 

Singularly to the point, too, is the reluctant, and 
therefore more weighty, testimony of that Romanist 
among Romanists, Bellarmin, as quoted by our author: 

" 'Propter incertudinem propriae justitiae et pericu- 
lum inanis gloriae, tutissimum est fiduciam totam, in 
sola Dei misericordia et benignitate reponere.' And 
then he explains this by saying that he means, not 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 45 

that. we should not pursue good works with all our 
might, not that they are not a true ground of confi- 
dence, are not real righteousness, or are unable to 
sustain God's judgment, but that it is safer in a man- 
ner to forget what we have done, and to look solely at 
God's mercy, because no one can know, except by 
revelation, whether or not he has done any good 
works, or whether he shall persevere, and because the 
contemplation of his good works, even if he could 
know of them, is dangerous, as being elating." (p. 356.) 

Here is the practical effect of the doctrine that we 
are justified by our inward righteousness and good 
works, even in part, put into a nut-shell. To count 
them in as part of our acceptability with God, tends 
both to unduly discourage and to falsely elate. 

But there is a sense in which the Romish and Prot- 
estant doctrines do approach each other. It is on the 
theoretical, the theological side. We are justified, 
says Rome, by faith and by works. Nay, says the 
Protestant, but by faith alone. What, will faith that 
brings forth no righteousness make you to be ac- 
cepted? • Nay, answers the Protestant, it must be a 
faith that is living, and that infallibly produces good 
works. What, then, the question suggests itself, is 
this living principle in faith which makes it a true, jus- 
tifying faith, and the absence of which makes it ineffec- 
tive ? What, in other words, differentiates a true from 
a false faith? Is it not this efficacy to produce in the 
soul a righteous state, a true fear and love of God; 
and is not this, then, an essential of justifying faith that 



46 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

it have, at least, the seed of holiness in itself? And 
what is this but to declare, by implication, if no more, 
that an actual holiness, is part of that faith which it is 
maintained formally and instrumentally justifies?. 
Thus, the antagonist of the Protestant doctrine. And, 
under the pressure of this line of reasoning, the Re- 
formers found themselves often hard put to, to make 
it appear that they really did differ from the Romish 
divines. Melanchthon went so far as to write, " Con- 
cedo in fiducia inesse dilectionem, et hanc virtutem et 
plerasque alias adesse opertere; sed cum dicimus, 
Fiducia sumus justi, non intelligatur nos propter vir- 
tutis istius dignitatem, sed per misericordiam recipi 
propter Mediatorem quern tamen opertet fide appre- 
hendi. Ergo hoc dicimus correlative." And there- 
upon arises the question, what is the real difference 
between saying with him that faith is not justifying 
unless love or holiness be with it; or with Bellarmin, 
that it is not so, unless love be in it Here are fine 
shades. For an exhaustive treatment of this point let 
the reader consult our author. But, surely, there is no 
escaping the conclusion that in the last analysis of the 
doctrines, both Romish and Protestant, they approach 
so near together that in substance they do all but 
coincide. The saving clause of the Reformed position 
is expressed in that qualification of Melanchthon's, 
"cum dicimus Fiducia sumus justi," etc. And yet 
neither Melanchthon nor any one else has made it 
clear, how it is that faith is constituted justifying by 
the presence of a living principle producing righteous- 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 47 

ness, and yet that which constitutes it a living faith, 
have no efficacy towards constituting the formal cause 
of justification. So fine become the lines of difference 
separating the opposite scientific theological state- 
ments. It is an approximation that must have struck 
every one, who has deeply pondered the question for 
himself, and Dr. Newman's treatment is only notice- 
able for the exquisite skill with which he traces the 
gradually approaching steps of the reasoning. 

We turn now to the general drift of our author's 
own exposition of the doctrine. After pointing out 
that the controversy mainly turns upon the question 
"whether Christians are or are not justified by obser- 
vance of the Moral Law," he proceeds to show that 
Justification means in Scripture both counting us 
righteous, and making us righteous. Nothing can 
better introduce this section of his argument than the 
following luminous statement in his own words : 

" That in our natural state, and by our own strength, 
we are not and cannot be justified by obedience, is ad- 
mitted on all hands, agreeably to St. Paul's forcible 
statements ; and to deny it is the heresy of Pelagius. 
But it is a distinct question altogether, whether with 
the presence of God the Holy Ghost we can obey unto 
justification; and, while the received doctrine in all 
ages of the Church has been, that through the large- 
ness and peculiarity of the gift of grace we can, it is 
the distinguishing tenet of the school of Luther, that 
through the incurable nature of our corruption we can- 
not. Or, what comes to the same thing, one side says 



48 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

that the righteousness in which God accepts us is in- 
herent, wrought in us by the grace flowing from 
Christ's Atonement ; the other says it is external, re- 
puted, nominal, being Christ's own sacred and most 
perfect obedience on earth, viewed by a merciful God 
as if it were ours." 

From this general statement of the question, he goes 
on to make it appear that- to justify, in its primary 
sense, means to declare righteous. This he does so 
thoroughly and luminously that one wonders as he 
reads how it can be shown to mean anything else. 
The argument is convincing and in the conclusion 
rises to a pitch of power that deserves to be quoted at 
length. We do so for its lofty eloquence and profound 
spirit of devotion. 

" It [justification] is an act as signal, as great, as com- 
plete, as was the condemnation into which sin plunged 
us. Whether or not it involves renewal, it is evidently 
something of a more formal and august nature than 
renewal. Justification is a word of state and solemnity. 
Divine mercy might have renewed ue and kept it se- 
cret; this would have been an infinite and most un- 
merited grace, but he has done more. He justifies 
us; he not only makes, he declares, acknowledges, 
accepts us as holy. He recognizes us as his own, and 
publicly repeals the sentence of wrath and the penal 
statutes which lie against us. He sanctifies us gradu- 
ally ; but justification is a perfect act, anticipating at 
once in the sight of God what sanctification does but 
tend towards. In it, the whole course of sanctification 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 49 

is summed, reckoned, or imputed to us in its very be- 
ginning. Before man has done anything as specimen, 
or paid anything as installment, except faith, nor even 
faith in the case of infants, he has the whole treasure 
of redemption put to his credit, as if he were and had 
done infinitely more than he ever can be or do. He 
is 'declared' after the pattern of his Saviour, to be the 
adopted ' Son of God with power by a ' spiritual ' resur- 
rection.' His tears are wiped away; his fears, misgiv- 
ings, remorse, shame, are changed for ' righteousness, 
and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost;' he is clad in 
white and has a crown given him. Thus justification is 
at first what renewal could but be at last ; and therefore, 
is by no means a mere result or consequence of re- 
newal, but a real, though not a separate act of God's 
mercy. It is a great and august deed in the sight of 
heaven and hell ; it is not done in a corner, but by 
him who would show the world 'what should be 
done unto those whom the King delighteth to honor.' 
It is a pronouncing righteous while it proceeds to 
make righteous. * * The declaration of our right- 
eousness, while it contains pardon for the past, prom- 
ises holiness for the future." (p. 74.) 

Here, too, through the body of truth so grandly 
enounced, run veins of error so delicately modulated 
into falseness as to be almost indistinguishable from 
the texture in which they lie. Thus our author: 

"The whole cause of sanctification is summed, reck- 
oned, or imputed to us in its very beginning." 

But it is not our sanctification yet to come that is 
4 



50 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

imputed to us in justification, but Christ's perfect 
righteousness. Again : 

" Before man has done anything as specimen, or paid 
anything as installment, except faith, * * he has 
the whole treasures of redemption put to his credit." 

Most true the "treasures of redemption" are "put 
to his credit," but not because faith is reckoned as an 
installment of his debt of duty to God. And so 
throughout truth and error mingle. 

But we read on, and presently we discover the 
turning point where our author and Protestant reader 
part company. 

" Our justification is not a mere declaration of a past 
fact, or a testimony to what is present, or an announce- 
ment of what is to come, * * but it is the cause 
of that being which before was not, and henceforth is" 

( P . 7 8.) 

And what is this which "before was not, and hence- 
forth is?" Our author does not leave us in doubt on 
this point. 

"Justification is an announcement or fiat of Al- 
mighty God, which breaks upon the gloom of our nat- 
ural state as the Creative Word upon Chaos; it de- 
clares the soul righteous, and in that declaration, on 
the one hand, conveys pardon for its past sins, and on 
the other makes it actually righteous. * * That it 
involves an actual creation in righteousness has been 
argued from the analogy of Almighty God's doings in 
Scripture, in which we find His words were repre- 
sented as effective." (pp. 83, 84.) 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 5 I 

And, finally, in the most explicit manner. 

" Justification renews, therefore I say it may fitly be 
called renewal." (p. 86.) 

Here, then, we arrive at last, at the author's object- 
ive point: "Justification is renewal." And as we 
look back to that from which we set out, viz., " that 
Justification is the 'glorious voice of the Lord' declar- 
ing us to be righteous ;" and that "it must mean an 
imputation or declaration;" and that "if it be once 
granted to mean an imputation, it cannot mean any- 
thing else; since it cannot have two meanings at 
once" (p. 6f)\ — we say, when we look back to this 
point of departure, we cannot but admire the skill by 
which we have been led step by step without percepti- 
ble jar or false turn, through the labyrinth of the 
author's wonderful dialectic to his conclusion that Jus- 
tification is something else than " declaring us to be 
righteous," viz. : that it is renewal. We set out from 
the postulate, "justification must mean an imputation," 
and "cannot mean anything else;" and we land in the 
conclusion that justification does, notwithstanding, 
mean something quite else, viz. : "an actual creation 
in righteousness." (p. 84). This is nothing short of 
logical legerdemain. 

The nexus by which the two meanings are made to 
slide into each other, it will be seen, is simply this, 
that what God declares must actually be. If he de- 
clares us righteous, righteous we must be ; and that 
not in any imputed sense in which a quality is reck- 
oned to be where it actually is not; but righteous by 



52 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the possession of an indwelling holiness. " God's 
word, I say, effects what it announces." (p. 8 1.) 

Now this is very skilful ; but their lies against it just 
one objection, viz.: the fact that we are not holy in the 
sense in which in justification we are accounted such ; 
that confessedly, no man is thus holy. This objection 
our author sees and endeavors to meet in this wise. 

"How," he asks, "can we, children of Adam, be 
said really and truly to be righteous, in a sense distinct 
from the imputation of righteousness ? I observe, then, 
we become inwardly just or righteous in God's sight, 
upon our regeneration, in the same sense in which we 
are utterly reprobate and abominable by nature. * * 
Justification, coming to us in the power and 'inspira- 
tion of the Spirit,' so far dries up the fountain of bitter- 
ness and impurity, that we are forthwith released from 
God's wrath and damnation, and are enabled in our 
better deeds to please him. It places us above the 
line in the same sense in which we were before below 
it." (pp. 89, 90, 91). 

Now, in all this there is a measure of truth. It is 
true that the works of righteousness which are wrought 
by the justified are acceptable to God. The Spirit 
does make our works pleasing and acceptable to God. 
But we are not therefore justified; neither is our righ- 
teousness indwelling such as could be accepted as a 
perfect righteousness. It is accepted, but only as a 
first-fruits and pledge of what shall be as the earnest 
of the Spirit in us ; not as meeting the command of 
Christ, " this do and ye shall live." This our author 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 53 

himself confesses when he says, " not that there is not 
abundant evil still remaining in us," (p. 90), after jus- 
tification. We are very far from being what God de- 
clares we must be, " holy even as he is holy." So 
that if our indwelling righteousness in and after justi- 
fication is to be accounted as a perfect righteousness, 
and James declares none else can be accepted as meet- 
ing the demands of the holy law, then it must be by a 
fiction in which an imperfect obedience is, under the 
circumstances, counted as a perfect obedience. What 
difference then, in the terms of our author's argument, 
whether our simple trust or our imperfect obedience, 
as it confessedly is imperfect, be accounted to us for 
righteousness. In either case the argument that what 
God declares righteous must be actually and in itself 
righteous falls to the ground. And so vanishes the 
beautiful fabric of dialectic by which it is to be shown 
that to justify means only to declare righteous and then 
that it also must mean to make righteous. 

But whilst dissenting from his conclusion one can- 
not but admire the masterly skill with which the ar- 
gument is handled. One almost loses the sense of 
displeasure at the error in the charm of the consum- 
mate dialectic and rhetoric with which it is maintained. 
Were ever the abstractions of theology made so bril- 
liant? There are passages in this connection that have 
all the effect of wit, while they are loaded with all the 
weight of abstract definition and distinction. Thus, 
for instance, in discussing the question, whether by 
justification we are made righteous or only accounted 
so, he pours forth the following strain : 



54 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

" In vain does St. Paul declare again and again, that 
we are righteous ; the Protestant Masters have ruled 
that we are not really so. They have argued that, if 
we were really made righteous, Christ would cease to 
be our righteousness, and tlierefore we certainly are not 
really made righteous; which is much the same as ar- 
guing, that Christ must cease to be our ' sanctification,' 
because we are made holy, or that we are not made 
holy because he is our ' sanctification;' in a word, that 
he in his infinite fulness cannot give without a loss, 
and we in our utter nothingness cannot be in the con- 
tinual receipt of benefits without thereby ceasing to be 
dependent. 

"Again: When our Lord says to the Scribe who had 
rehearsed to him the commandments, 'This do and 
thou' shalt live,' it is replied that he spoke in a sort 
of irony. 

"Again : When he says, that unless our righteousness 
exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, we shall in 
no case enter into the kingdom of heaven; and pro- 
nounces them blessed 'who hunger and thirst after 
righteousness,' and ' who are persecuted for righteous- 
ness' sake,' and bids us ' seek the kingdom of God and 
his righteousness;' it is sometimes openly, often by 
implication, answered, that all this was spoken by our 
Lord before St. Paul wrote. 

"Again : When St. Paul, who is thus appealed to, 
says expressly, that ' the righteousness of the Law is 
fulfilled in us,' then Luther is summoned to lay it 
down as a first principle, that the doctrine of our justi- 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 55 

fication without any inherent righteousness is the 
criterion of a standing or falling church. 

"Again : When St. Paul says, ' I can do all things 
through Christ which strengtheneth me,' this is sup- 
posed to mean all things except fulfilling the Law; 
and when he says, in another place, that ' love is the 
fulfilling of the Law/ and that love is not only attain- 
able, but a duty, we are arbitrarily answered by a dis- 
tinction, that such love that suffices for the fulfilling 
of the Law is one thing, and such love as is enjoined 
as a Christian grace is another. 

"Again : When we urge what Hezekiah says, ' Re- 
member now, O Lord, I beseech Thee, how I have 
walked before Thee in truth and with a perfect heart, 
and have done that which is good in Thy sight f or 
Nehemiah, '' Remember me, O my God, concerning 
this, and wipe not out my good deeds that I have done 
for the house of my God, and for the offices thereof/ 
all the answer we obtain is, that, whatever comes of 
Hezekiah and Nehemiah, it is evidently self-righteous 
and a denial of the merits of Christ, and shocking to 
the feelings of the serious mind, to say that we can do 
anything really good in God's sight, even with the 
grace of Christ, anything in consideration of which 
God will look mercifully upon us. 

"Again: St. Paul speaks of things 'just,' of 'virtue' 
and of 'praise/ of 'providing things honest in the sight 
of the Lord} of being ' acceptable to God;' but in vain 
does he thus vary his expressions, as if by way of 
commenting on the word ' righteous,' and imprinting 



56 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

upon our minds this one idea of inherent acceptable- 
ness : — no, this has become a forbidden notion ; it 
must not even enter the thoughts, though an Evan- 
gelist plead and a Prophet threaten ever so earnestly. 

''Again : ' Work must have two senses ; for though 
we are bid to work out our salvation, God working in 
us, this can not really mean ' Work out your salvation 
through God's working in you;' ^/^justification would 
be, not of grace, nor of faith, but of works of the Law. 

"And 'reward,' too, it seems, has two senses; for the 
reward which Scripture bids us labor for, cannot, it is 
said, be a reward in the real and ordinary sense of 
the word ; it is not really a reward, but is merely called 
such, by way of animating our exertion and consoling 
us in despondency. 

"Again : The ' righteousness,' which justifies, though 
spoken of as a quality of our souls in Scripture, can- 
not mean anything in us, because the Jews sought a 
justifying righteousness, not ' through Christ but by 
the ' external 'works of the Law;' and therefore if we 
seek justifying righteousness solely from Christ, and 
not at all from works done in our own strength, in 
inward renovation, not external profession, we shall 
stumble and fall as did the Jews. 

"Again: It is argued that justifying righteousness 
cannot be of the Law, because if a man ' offend in one 
point, he is guilty of all,' that is, since St. James says, 
that, when love is azvay, we offend the Law in many 
points, therefore when love is present, we cannot fulfill 
it consistently, however imperfectly, like Zacharias. 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 57 

" Lastly : ' Righteousness ' is said to have two senses, 
because St. Paul declares, that as 'Christ was made sin 
for us who had known no sin,' so ' we are made the 
righteousness of God in Him :' for, it is argued, since 
when we were unrighteous, Christ was imputed to us 
for righteousness ; therefore, now that Christ has been 
imputed to us for righteousness, we shall ever be un- 
righteous still. 

" Such is the nature of the arguments on which it is 
maintained that two perfectly separate senses must be 
given to the word ' righteousness;' that justification is 
one gift, sanctification another; that deliverance from 
guilt is one work of God, deliverance from sin another; 
that reward does not really mean reward, praise not 
really praise, availableness not really availableness, 
worth not really worth, acceptableness not really ac- 
ceptableness ; that none but St. Paul may allowably 
speak of ' working out our salvation ;' none but St. Peter, 
of ' Baptism saving us ;' none but St. John, of ' doers of 
righteousness being righteous;' that when St. Paul 
speaks of ' all faith,' he means all but true faith ; and 
when St. James says, not by faith only, he means noth- 
ing but true faith ; that it is not rash to argue that justi- 
fication cannot be by works, because it is by faith, 
though it is rash to conclude that Christ is not God, 
because he is man; and that, though it is a sin, as it 
surely is, to infer that Christ is not God, because Scrip- 
ture calls the Father the only God, yet it is no sin to 
argue that works cannot justify, because Luther, not 
Scripture, says that faith only justifies." (pp. no, 117.) 



58 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Surely, never was dialectic so sparkling, at once so 
weighty and so witty. To be handled by such an an- 
tagonist affords the exquisite satisfaction, one may 
suppose, to have been the culprit's who was so deftly 
decapitated, according to the Eastern story, as to be 
unaware when it was his head was severed from the 
body. 

But we must not lose sight of the measure of truth 
solemnly enforced by Dr. Newman in urging these 
views: the truth that when God justifies, he does im- 
part a new life to the justified man. This is one side 
of the truth which Protestantism, in its enforced un- 
happy attitude of antagonism to the ancient error, has 
neglected. Neglected, I say, for it has never denied 
it. But it has been our misfortune to be so busy re- 
pelling the notion that we are justified by the right- 
eousness that is wrought in us, as to lose sight of the 
co-ordinate truth that a righteousness is Wrought in us 
who are justified; and that not as an after-work, as 
something added on, but inseparable, in its initial 
steps, from the justifying act of God. 

On this our author speaks wisely: 

" The great benefit of justification, as all will allow, 
is this one thing, — the transference of the soul from 
the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of Christ. 
We may, if we will, divide this event into parts, and 
say that it is both pardon and renovation ; but such a 
division is merely mental, and does not affect the 
change itself, which is but one act. If a man is saved 
from drowning, you may, if you will, say he is both 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 59 

rescued from the water and brought into atmospheric 
air; this is a discrimination in words not in things. 
He cannot be brought out of the water which he can- 
not breathe, except by entering the air which he can 
breathe. In like manner, there is, in fact, no middle 
state between a state of wrath and a state of holiness. 
In justifying, God takes away what is past, by bringing 
in what is new. He snatches out of the fire by lifting 
us in his everlasting hands, and enwrapping us in his 
own glory." (p. 102.) 

Much arises in mind that might be said on this 
point. It is a fruitful topic, and one that needs to be 
opened and enforced on the religous shallowness of the 
day. But we must hasten on. 

Our author goes on to show that the Righteous- 
ness, which he holds is our justification, is a "gift," 
and, therefore, of necessity a substantial something 
within the soul; and, further, that this quality super- 
added, and in which our justification consists, is that 
supernatural endowment which Adam lost in the Fall. 

" Whatever else, then, Adam had by creation, this 
seems to have been one main supernatural gift, or 
rather that in which all others were included, the 
presence of God the Holy Ghost in him, exalting him 
into the family and service of his Almighty Creator. 
This was his clothing; this he lost by disobedience; 
this Christ has regained for us. This then is the robe 
of righteousness spoken of by Isaiah, to be bestowed 
in its fullness hereafter, bestowed partially at once." 
(p. 160.) 



60 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Upon this point he says many very, as they seem to 
us, erroneous things ; but also some that are full of the 
power of solemn truth. For instance beginning with 
a declaration so doubtful and dangerous as this, " Justi- 
fication is the setting up of the Cross within us," — he 
goes on in a strain of mingled sweetness and solem- 
nity, of meditation and exposition, thus: 

"Justification actually does involve a spiritual cir- 
cumcision, a crucifixion of the flesh, or sanctification. 
The entrance of Christ's sacred presence into the soul, 
which becomes our righteousness in God's sight, at 
the same time becomes righteousness in it. * * It 
is very necessary to insist upon this, for a reason 
which has come before us in other shapes already. It 
is the fashion of the day to sever these two from one 
another, which God has joined, the seal and the im- 
pression, justification and renewal. You hear men 
speak of glorying in the Cross of Christ, who are 
utter strangers to the notion of the Cross as actually 
applied to them in water and blood, in holiness and 
mortification. They think the Cross can be theirs 
without being applied, — without its coming near them 
— while they keep at a distance from it, and only gaze 
at it. They think individuals are justified immediately 
by the great Atonement — justified by Christ's death, 
and not, as St. Paul says, by means of his Resurrec- 
tion — justified by what they consider looking at his 
death. Because the Brazen Serpent in the wilderness 
healed by being looked at, they consider that Christ's 
Sacrifice saves by the mind contemplating it. This is 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 6 1 

what they call casting themselves upon Christ — com- 
ing before him simply and without self-trust, and 
being saved by faith. Surely we ought so to come to 
Christ; surely we must believe; surely we must look; 
but the question is, in what form and manner he gives 
himself to us; and it will be found that, when he 
enters into us, glorious as he is himself, pain and 
self-denial are his attendants. Gazing on the Brazen 
Serpent did not heal; but God's invisible communica- 
tion of the gift of health to those who gazed. * * 
Christ's Cross does not justify by being looked at, but 
by being applied; not by as merely beheld by faith, 
but by being actually set up within us, and that not by 
our act, but by God's invisible grace. Men sit, and 
gaze, and speak of the great Atonement, and think 
this is appropriating it; not more truly than kneeling 
to the material cross itself is appropriating it. Men 
say that faith is an apprehending and applying; faith 
cannot really apply the Atonement ; man cannot make 
the Saviour of the world his own; the Cross must be 
brought home to us, not in word, but in power, and 
this is the work of the Spirit. This is justification; 
but when imparted to the soul, it draws blood, it heals, 
it purines, it glorifies." (p. 175). 

So intertwined are the strands of truth and error in 
this eloquent passage that one hardly sees his way 
clear to disentangle them. How much of solemn, 
edifying truth is here brought home to our hearts; 
but with it so much, too, of error, that the first impulse 
is to cast it all away. But the truth is too true, too 



62 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

needful, to be lightly thrown aside. We seem to hear 
in the consecutive sentences first a chord, and then a 
discord. But we must bear the discord for the sake 
of the chord. Thus: 

"Justification actually does involve a spiritual cir- 
cumcision, a crucifixion of the flesh, or sanctification." 

Is not this truth? But then in the next sentence 
jars the discord : 

" The entrance of Christ's sacred presence into the 
soul, which becomes our righteousness in God's 
sight," etc. 

This surely is error, though beautiful error; error in 
the disguise of an angel of light. 

Again : 

" You hear men speak of glorying in the Cross of 
Christ, who are utter strangers to the notion of the 
Cross as actually applied to them in water and blood, 
in holiness and mortification." 

True, again ; how sadly true,' as is witnessed in all 
our churches. But in the next sentence recurs the 
dissonance: 

"They think individuals are justified immediately by 
the great atonement," etc. 

And so the strain alternates from a solemn utter- 
ance of the greatest of truths to the modulation of 
the subtlest of errors. But we may not throw away 
the gold because in it there is dross. "Justification 
is " not " setting up the cross within us ; " but if we are 
justified that Cross surely must be set up in us. " The 
entrance of Christ's sacred presence into the soul does" 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 63 

not "become our righteousness in God's sight;" but if 
we would become righteous, truly that presence, with 
all its attendant travail and pangs, must enter. 

It is truth such as this that needs to be preached to 
the easy-going church of these days, days when the 
religion of Christ has become a self-indulgent thing, 
the making the best as one eminent divine terms it, of 
both worlds. It is the neglect of this side of truth 
that has driven away from the evangelical churches 
such men as the pure and self-denying Robertson with 
his bitter complaint that " the Protestant penitent re- 
pents in an arm-chair, is very glad that a broken- 
hearted remorse is distrust of God, and is satisfied to 
be all safe, which is the great point in his religion." 
Surely we need to listen to teaching that points a self- 
indulgent religious age back to the way of the Cross 
once more, and reminds us that the great apostle of 
Justification by Faith declared solemnly of himself, " I 
am crucified with Christ." One passage in this con- 
nection from our author is worthy, for its solemn 
warning to weigh against all his mistaken doctrine: 
"The saving Cross crucifies us in saving." 

Other passages have been marked in the work under 
consideration for quotation and comment, but space 
will not allow us to take them up. 

This discussion is concluded by a general view of 
the Protestant position and its practical results as a 
system. At some length, our author retorts upon his 
opponents the charge of Judaism, which is so often 
levelled against the Romanizing schools. And here, 



64 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

as so often in this admirable but dangerous writer, — 
all the more dangerous because, both by reason of his 
intellectual strength and deep, pure piety, he is so ad- 
mirable, — here, as throughout his writings, truth and 
error mingle almost inextricably. We give at length 
the passage that concludes his work, premising only 
that, as it seems to us, there is no less of error here 
than usually mingles with his teachings. Surely much 
that he says has struck many of us, though we have 
not been able to express it so forcibly. Does he not 
seem to be describing many of our modern teachers 
and preachers? Are there not whole classes of re- 
ligious writers much in vogue, whose error he depicts 
to the life? For all that calls itself Protestant and 
Evangelical, is not therefore scriptural and wholesome. 

" I would say this, then: — that a system of doctrines 
has risen up in which faith or spiritual-mindedness is 
contemplated and rested on as the end of religion in- 
stead of Christ. I do not mean to say that Christ is 
not mentioned as the Author of all good, but that 
stress is laid rather on the believing than on the Object 
of belief, on the comfort and persuasiveness of the doc- 
trine rather than on the doctrine itself. And in this 
way religion is made to consist in contemplating our- 
selves instead of Christ; not simply in looking to 
Christ, but in ascertaining that we look to Christ, not 
in his Divinity and Atonement, but in our conversion 
and our faith in those truths. 

" The fault here spoken of is the giving to our ' ex- 
periences' a more prominent place in our thoughts 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 65 

than to the nature, attributes, and work of him from 
whom they profess to come, — the insisting on them as 
a special point for the consideration of all who desire 
to be recognized as converted and elect. When men 
are to be exhorted to newness of life, the true object 
to be put before them, as I conceive, is 'Jesus Christ, 
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever;' the true 
gospel preaching is to enlarge, as they can bear it, on" 
the person, nature, attributes, offices, and work of 
him; to dwell upon his recorded words and deeds on 
earth. * * The true preaching of the Gospel is to 
preach Christ. But the fashion of the day has been,: 
instead of this, to preach conversion; to attempt to 
convert by insisting on conversion ; to exhort men to 
undergo a change; to tell them to be sure they look 
at Christ, instead of simply holding up Christ to them; 
to tell them to have faith, rather than to supply its 
Object; to lead them to stir up and work up their 
minds, instead of impressing on them the thought of 
him who can savingly work in them; to bid them- 
take care their faith is justifying, not dead, formal, 
self-righteousness, and merely moral, whereas the 
image of Christ fully delineated of itself destroys dead- 
ness, formality, and self-righteousness; to rely on 
words, vehemence, eloquence, and the like, rather than 
to aim at conveying the one great evangelical idea 
whether in words or not. And thus faith and spiritual- 
mindedness are dwelt on as ends, and obstruct the 
view of Christ, just as the Law was perverted by the 
Jews." 
5 



66 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

He then proceeds to comment at length on passages 
from Newton's Letters and Haweis' Sermons in illus- 
tration of what has been quoted above. This from its 
length we must pass over, though it is full of point. 
We have space only for the latter part of the extract 
from Haweis, with the running comment. 

" For if you have never seen " (not your Saviour, 
but) "your ' desperately wicked heart, — been united to 
Christ " (by his love and grace ? no, but) " by faith, — 
renounced your own righteousness to be found in him, 
and receive from him newness" (receive, as if the great 
thing was not his giving but our taking), " if you know 
not experimentally what is meant by ' fellowship with 
the Father and his Son Jesus Christ;'" (observe, not 
" if you have not fellowship," but " if you know not you 
have ;" and this self-seeking, as it may truly be called, 
is named experimental religion ;) " if your devotion hath 
not been inspired • by faith which worketh by love ;' 
if your worship hath not been in ■ spirit and truth,' 
from a real sense of your wants, and an earnest desire 
and expectation of receiving from him ' in whom all 
fulness dwells;' if this hath not been your case, your 
devotions have been unmeaning ceremonies." " Poor 
miserable captives," proceeds the comment, "to whom 
such doctrine is preached as the Gospel ! What ! is 
this the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and 
wherein we stand, the home of our own thoughts, the 
prison of our own sensations, the province of self, a 
monotonous confession of what we are by nature, not 
what Christ is in us, and a resting at best not on 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION. 6j 

his love towards us, but in our faith towards him ? 
This is nothing but a specious idolatry; a man thus 
minded does not simply think of God when he prays 
to him, but is observing - whether he feels properly or 
not ; does not believe and obey, but considers it enough 
to be conscious that he is what he calls warm and 
spiritual" (pp. 324, 326, 329). 

It would be interesting to introduce here a remarka- 
ble contrast drawn by our author, in an extended note, 
of the respective modes of treating a death-bed, in the 
"Visitation of the Sick," and the " Dairyman's Daugh- 
ter;" but our limited space forbids. We hasten to 
conclude these too extended quotations : 

"If the doctrine of justifying faith must be taken as 
a practical direction, and in a certain sense it may, 
then we must word it, not 'justification through faith,' 
but, 'justification by Christ' Thus interpreted, the 
rule it gives is, l go to Christ;' but taken in the letter, 
it seems to say merely, 'Get faith; become spiritual; 
see that you are not mere moralists, mere formalists; 
see that you feel. If you do not feel, Christ will profit 
you nothing; you must have a spiritual taste; you 
must see yourself to be a sinner; you must accept, 
apprehend, appropriate the gift; you must be 
conscious of a change wrought in you, for the most 
part going through the successive stages of darkness, 
trouble, error, light, and comfort. Thus the poor and 
sorrowful soul, instead of being led at once to the 
source of all good, is taught to make much of the con- 
flict of truth and falsehood within itself as the pledge 



68 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

of God's love, and to picture to itself faith as a sort of 
passive quality which sits amid the ruins of human na- 
ture, and keeps up what may be called a silent protest 
or indulges a pensive meditation over its misery. 
True faith is what may be called colorless, like air or 
water; it is but the medium through which the soul 
sees Christ ; and the soul as little really rests upon it 
and contemplates it, as an eye can see the air. When,, 
then, men are bent on holding (as it were) in their 
hands, curiously inspecting, analyzing, and so aiming 
at it, they are obliged to color and thicken it, that it 
may be seen and touched. That is, they substitute for 
it something or other, a feeling, notion, sentiment, con- 
viction, or act of reason, which they may hang over, 
and doat upon. They rather aim at experiences (as 
they are called) within them, than at him that is with- 
out them. They are led to enlarge upon the signs of 
conversion, the variations of their feelings, their, aspi- 
rations and longings, and to tell all this to others; — to 
tell others how they fear, and hope, and sin, and re- 
joice, and renounce themselves, and rest in Christ 
only ; how conscious they are that their best deeds are 
but 'filthy rags,' and all is of grace, till, in fact, they 
have little time left them to guard against what they 
are condemning, and to exercise what they think they 
are full of." 

How exactly does all this describe some of the worst 
errors in practice into which our modern Evangelical 
Churches have fallen ! Are not these the phases of 
religious sickliness and shallowness and poverty which 



NEWMAN ON JUSTIFICATION.' 69 

one sees in religion as popularly understood and in- 
culcated in too many of our churches? But to con- 
clude. 

" Such is the difference between those whom Christ 
praises and those whom He. condemns or warns. The 
Pharisee recounted the signs of God's mercy upon 
him and in him; the Publican simply looked to God. 
The young ruler boasted of his correct life, but the 
penitent woman anointed Jesus' feet and kissed them. 
Nay, holy Martha herself spoke of her 'much service;' 
while Mary waited on him for the ' one thing needful.' 
The one thought of themselves ; the others thought of 
Christ. To look to Christ is to be justified by faith; 
to think of being justified by faith is to look from 
Christ and to fall from grace." 

Our task is done. Too much space, indeed, has 
been taken up with quotations, but we wished our au- 
thor to speak for himself. His errors and his splendid 
vindication of neglected truth, are alike obvious. His 
errors are those which all will unite to condemn; would 
we could say that the truth it has been given him to 
bring to view will be welcomed with a -consent as 
unanimous. 

(Reprinted by permission from The Quarterly Review of The Evangelical Luth- 
eran Church, for January, 1876). 



yO SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

THE CHINESE PROBLEM, OR AGNOSTICISM WORKED OUT. 



The practical form assumed by the religious skepti- 
cism of the day, is Agnosticism. Is there a God? has 
he given us a law? Shall we live after death? if we 
do, shall we be rewarded and punished according to 
our life here? To all these questions the skepticism 
of the times simply answers, "ignoramus." It does 
not deny that there is a God, a future life: it only 
says, " We do not know." As one distinguished Ag- 
nostic puts it: "Questions of theology are questions 
of lunar politics ; " there may be a reality answering to 
the speculation of theology, and there may be political 
activity in the moon; but we do and can know nothing 
about either. They are beyond the scope of human 
faculties. 

Now this is a position at ojice more difficult to at- 
tack, and yet more hopeful, than the old ground of 
dogmatic Atheism. It was not hard to show the impos- 
sibility of proving a negative as to the Divine Exis- 
tence. Let men analyze the universe as they would, 
and show the apparent sufficiency of matter and force 
to account for all phenomena; let them multiply objec- 
tions to the proofs of a Personal Cause and a future 
state; and yet there was that great realm of unex- 
plored possibility lying behind every philosophy. Be- 
hind force and matter there might be a Personal Intel- 
ligence, the spring of everything. After all the objec- 
tions to his existence, it might be that he did exist. 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. J\ 

The trouble was that between them and their conclu- 
sion, lay the deep wide gulf of human ignorance. 
What might not be hidden there? But now skepti- 
cism has removed that unknown region to its own 
side. Against every argument for the truth of Theism 
it entrenches itself in the dark: "we do not know;" 
" the data are insufficient; " " it may be so, but it is not 
proven." And that position can never be carried by 
direct argument. It will probably always remain to 
mere philosophy an open question. 

But practically it is a more hopeful position because 
of what it implies. And what does it imply? It 
seems to me it involves this, the recognition of the 
vastness and mystery of the Universe. The dogmatic 
Atheist must always be a man singularly insensible to 
certain facts of life. He perceives the facts that appeal 
to the senses, to the hard logical understanding, but he 
sees nothing more. The scheme of the Universe to 
his mind is all clear and compact : he sees to the very 
bounds of it and understands it. He traces the whole 
structure of things, animate and inanimate, from the 
original atoms; and when he ends, everything is ac- 
counted for, nothing is left out. He is impatient with 
every one who does not see how satisfactory his ex- 
planation is. But such a state of mind can exist only 
with a total insensibility to whole classes of feelings 
and experiences that are themselves real facts to be ac- 
counted for. That, at least, is not the position of the 
Agnostic. He recognizes the ultimate mystery, the 
contradictions, the unexplained stream of tendency in 



72 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

human nature. He does not admit the Theistic solu- 
tion of the problem; but he admits the problem. Life, 
he says, is a riddle; only there is no answer to it. 
But to see the problem, to feel the mystery and weight 
of it, is hopeful. It shows that the soul is alive and 
sensible. The Theistic solution may not be accepted, 
but a solution is felt to be needed. And there is 
always hope where there is dissatisfaction. I think we 
may recognize in the new form which skepticism has 
taken an indication of returning sensibility to the spir- 
itual facts of life. 

But while the skepticism of the day acknowledges 
the mystery of the Universe to be intellectually insol- 
uble, it proposes practically to solve it. The Universe 
can never be explained, says the Agnostic; well then, 
he goes on, we will ignore the part that is mysterious, 
and pay attention only to what we do know and can 
understand. And so he draws a line around the facts 
that are plain and intelligible, and all that lies outside 
of that narrow circle he gives over to neglect. 

The practical solution of the problem of life, then, is 
secularism. It says, " You cannot live for both worlds, 
because you do not know both. You know but one. 
Live for the one you do know." That is very plain; 
though like all rules of conduct, it is a good deal eas- 
ier to understand it than it is to carry it out. It may 
be doubted whether, as long as the intellectual prob- 
lem remains, the human mind will consent entirely to 
go on and ignore it. There is the mystery, and a 
mystery in the mind is like a foreign substance in the 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 73 

body; you cannot isolate it and enclose it in a neutral 
sack, and have the functions of life go on as if it were 
not. You may say, I will not think about it; but not 
thinking about it does not destroy it : it will exert its 
influence. The mind will be drawn to it; and after a 
season of practical activity it will go back to the mys- 
tery and try at its solution. Either that must happen, 
or the mystery must be destroyed, or lost sight of. 

But leaving that; let us suppose the mind of the 
race to be disengaged from the question and interests 
that have absorbed so much of its energy since the 
dawn of history. Let us grant that Agnosticism is 
practically made the rule of life, and that secularism 
becomes the religion of the race : men no longer ask 
of God and his character, of his will and purpose, 
nor of the future life; but the whole energy of mind is 
bent to the business of living here ; the horizon is nar- 
rowed to the life of the individual or, at the widest, to 
the prospects of the human family for the period of 
the earth's continuance. What then ? What may we 
look for as the result of that transfer and concentration 
of human energy? 

The Agnostics have their answer. They predict 
that the result of such a concentration of the powers 
of the race on the question of making the most of this 
life would be to ameliorate in a wonderful degree the 
evils of human existence. All hope of a future state 
•once given up, and the whole man bent on making the 
most of this world, there would be, they tell us, such a 
fund of ingenuity available for mastering the difficul- 



74 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

ties w'hich beset human life that we might expect, if 
not an extinction of the miseries of earthly existence, 
yet such an amelioration of them as would make life a 
state of extraordinary felicity. So impossible is it to 
extirpate that hope of the perfect state which has gen- 
erally been accredited to religion as one of its barren 
and injurious dreams. If there is to be no heaven be- 
yond, then men will dream of a heaven here; and so 
the Agnostic predicts a worldly Millennium. Taking 
heart by the great conquests of science and civilization 
over many of the manifest evils of life, he sees in the 
future a day when a larger knowledge and a riper civ- 
ilization will relieve the race from the miseries of dis- 
ease and poverty, bad government and wars, famines 
and accidents, and the whole train of human ills. He 
does not even despair of a day when, by attending 
carefully to the laws of good conduct and by improved 
education, the race will get rid of vice and crime. He 
believes in a kingdom of God to come, without any 
God of course, wherein shall dwell education and a 
superior knowledge, and from which all evil shall 
cease. It is a beautiful dream ; but the Agnostic hopes 
that some day it shall be made real. 

Take only the pictures of this condition painted by 
two very diverse Agnostics, leaders in their respective 
camps, Prof. Huxley, the prophet of salvation by 
science, and Mr. Matthew Arnold, the preacher of sal- 
vation by culture. Prof. Huxley describes the perfect 
man whom secularism, when it is finished, will bring 
forth, — " Who has been so trained in vouth that his 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 75 

body is the ready servant of his will, and does with 
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, 
it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic 
engine with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth 
working order ; ready, like a steam-engine, to be turned 
to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as 
forge the anchors of the mind ; whose mind is stored 
with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths 
of Nature and of the laws of her operations ; one who, 
no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose 
passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous 
will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has 
learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, 
to hate all vileness, and to respect all others as him- 
self." A very admirable figure; "without God in the 
world," it is true ; but not, according to Prof. Huxley, 
without hope. But the " trained body," and "trained 
passions," and "cold logic engine," — is it not just all a 
little too suggestive of an automaton ? Is there not 
the least creak in the world about the joints ? Auto- 
mata, however, I believe, is what Prof. Huxley says 
we all are at bottom. But such automaton figures 
secularism is to turn out, as a button-machine turns 
out buttons, each the fac-simile of its fellow, and all 
perfect after their kind. 

Mr. Arnold has a vision of a future even loftier. He 
has got rid, it is true, of God by ignoring Him, and of 
a future state by turning his back on it ; but he still 
believes in a kingdom of God ; — a very earthly sort of 
kingdom, however, if we may be allowed to say so. 



yb SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

" The expression, the kingdom of God," he says, 
" does point to a transformation of this present world 
through the victory of what Butler calls virtue, and 
what the Bible calls righteousness, and what in gen- 
eral religious people call goodness ; it does suggest 
such transformation as possible." This possibility, 
which he expounds to be the immortality Christ has 
brought to light in the Gospel, is to be realized by 
" coming to live, even here in this present world, with 
the higher impersonal life." And this "impersonal 
life," we are assured, men will reach some day by the 
agency of culture. This substitute for the grand vision 
of eternal life in the heavenly state, is a poor flat thing ; 
but, such as it is, it is a kind of millennium, the millen- 
nium of culture and commonplace. Another dream ! 

But there is a nearer way to get at the probable ef- 
fects of Agnosticism on the race than these conjectures. 
If we can find a people on whom the experiment of 
dropping out the belief in the supernatural has been 
tried, we shall discover in their history what we seek. 
And with such a people the events of our time are 
bringing us into close contact. 

We have been brought face to face in a very practi- 
cal way of late with the civilization of China; and the 
longer we study it the more baffling does it seem. 
Practically we do not know what to do with the China- 
man ; and intellectually we find the explanation of the 
civilization he represents the hardest of problems. Here 
are a people who, before the civilization of the western 
world was born, had possessed themselves of some of 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 7/ 

the greatest of modern inventions, gunpowder, printing 
and the mariner's compass ; and who, when Rome was 
yet a rude and petty republic, had organized an elab- 
orate and powerful government. But in the midst of 
this advance there suddenly came a pause. For 2,500 
years the fabric of Chinese society and polity has stood 
motionless. Since that pause the whole face of Europe 
has been transformed twice over: one civilization has 
come and gone, and a second has reached what seems 
its maturity; but in China not a shadow of change has 
intervened. Generations have come and gone, but the 
nation continues motionless : it is the cloud on the side 
of the mountain, in which the particles are ceaselessly 
appearing and disappearing while the whole remains 
unaltered. 

And this is not the pause that comes between ad- 
vance and decline ; if it were, it would be the pause of 
a life too vast to be measured by any chronology 
known to history. But China is as vigorous to-day 
as she was 2,000 years ago. Her population display a 
vitality and tenacity equal to that of the youngest and 
strongest nations. They seem to have mastered the 
problem of how to get the most out of life with the 
smallest expenditure of material. It is this that makes 
them so odious to the people of California. As one has 
described them : " They can live and work hard in all 
climates ; they take and lose life with absolute indiffer- 
ence ; their armies in Central Asia advance with such 
deadly perseverance that they plant and reap corn after 
one campaign in order to prepare for the. next, and, 



' 



78 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

they kill the males of conquered districts with the same 
calm with which they throw a bridge over a stream. " 
Of all nations on the face of the earth, it must be con- 
ceded that they have best learned how to make the most 
of this world. They have reduced life, meaning by that 
comfortable and healthy existence here, to a science. 
And yet they make no progress. It is this combina- 
tion of energetic, persistent vitality with an utter immo- 
bility, that makes them the puzzle of history. With 
us vitality has always been associated with progress. 
It has seemed impossible that a man or a race should 
be strong and not advance. But here is a nation that 
for nearly 3,000 years has neither advanced nor receded, 
and is yet one of the most persistent races on the face 
of the earth. 

There is only one feature in their history that throws 
any light on the problem. It is their religion. Five 
centuries before Christ, Confucius fixed his hold on the 
nation, and penetrated the popular mind with his 
theories of religion and of life. It has been disputed 
whether he was the creator of the present mental con- 
dition of the Chinese people, or only the skillful inter- 
preter of tendencies and dispositions that were moving 
disconnectedly in the general mind. Be that as it 
may, China since his day has maintained the attitude 
towards the problem of life which he took. Other 
religions have come and gone among them ; but they 
have touched only the surface. Confucianism has pos- 
sessed the Chinese mind, colored all its habits, and 
given its peculiar tone. 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 79 

And what is Confucianism ? In brief, it is Agnosti- 
cism : it is the only practical form Agnosticism has 
ever taken. In fact, we should not be far out of the 
way if we were to describe Chinese civilization as Ag- 
nosticism worked out. 

A brief description of its principal features will suf- 
fice. Confucius, who was born B. C. 551, came on the 
stage at a great crisis in the history of his people. 
* The World," says Mencius, his follower, " had fallen 
into decay, and right principles had disappeared. Per- 
verse discourses and oppressive deeds were waxen rife. 
Ministers murdered their rulers, and sons their fathers. 
Confucius was frightened by what he saw — and he 
undertook the work of reformation." It was the decay 
of a feudal civilization, a condition of things much like 
that of Western Europe in the 14th century. But 
China had this -advantage : literary culture and many 
arts of civilization had arrived at a high pitch of emi- 
nence. But, in spite of great knowledge and much 
skill in arts, the period was one of thorough degener- 
acy. Into this chaos Confucius came as a reformer. 
He attempted to effect nis work of regeneration at first 
through political means ; he sought the rulers, hoping 
to influence them. But in this he was foiled. He 
traveled from city to city, trying first one great poten- 
tate and then another, but none would adopt his 
schemes of reform. " If any ruler," he once said, 
xi would submit to me as his director for twelve months, 
I should accomplish something considerable ; and in 
three years I should attain the realization of my hopes." 



SO SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

In his 69th yeai he gave up the attempt to carry out 
his ideas by any political means, and retired into seclu- 
sion, to devote his few remaining years to literary work, 
and the instruction of a few devoted disciples. In five 
years he died, his life an apparent failure. But the day 
of his burial was the beginning of his influence over 
the nation. He became at once an object of admira- 
tion ; his works were studied with avidity ; his ideas 
took hold both of the cultivated and popular mind; 
and from that grasp the Chinese people have never 
been released. Under his tuition ages ago they be- 
came a nation of Secularists, and Secularism is the 
system under which they have lived to this day. 

He proposed that men should learn the laws of their 
well-being and follow them ; but that well-being he 
restricted wholly to the present life. He considered 
man only in society, and that society" as existing only 
here. And his reforms were only of a political and 
superficially ethical character. The highest ideal was 
the State ; the perfection of the State was the absolute 
perfection, the summum bonnm ; and all his teachings 
were directed to securing that. His method for attain- 
ing this was very simple; it -was only the regulation 
of manners. He collected and codified a horde of 
petty maxims and precepts ; and these he enforced by 
one fundamental virtue, obedience. The first virtue 
was obedience to parents ; the next, obedience to the 
powers of government ; the highest stretch of perfec- 
tion was devotion to the Emperor. There was, how- 
ever, very little that was systematic in the teachings of 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 8 I 

Confucius. It was no one great idea that gave him 
mastery over the mind of his people ; but rather a prac- 
tical spirit. 

There are three questions, however, that test at once 
the spiritual character of any moral or religious sys- 
tem : they are these ; what does it teach about God ; 
what about a future state ; what about sin ? If we try 
Confucianism by these, it will be evident how com- 
pletely Agnostic it is. 

As to the teachings of Confucius about the Being of 
God, it is significant that it is still an open question 
with scholars whether he believed in a personal God at 
all. Arnauld and other writers broadly assert that he 
did not. In speaking on the subject, Confucius him- 
self uses only the vague impersonal term, Heaven. 
And this stands only for a cold abstraction of the logi- 
cal faculty, certainly not the personal and spiritual 
Being we mean by our word God. Certain it is that 
he had fixed his own vague and irresolute way of re- 
garding the question on the Chinese mind ; for scholars 
still dispute as to what word they shall use, or if indeed 
there be any word in the Chinese language they can 
use, to express the idea of God. To all inquiries as 
to a personal Deity and Creator he gave answers that 
are pure_A.gnosticism. " You find yourself," he says, 
" in the midst of a stupendous, yet most orderly piece 
of mechanism. That mechanism, so far as we can tell, 
is self-originating, self-sustaining. Change there is, but 
no creation : all things from eternity existed, and were 
subject to a flux and reflux, in obedience to initial laws 



82 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

impressed upon them, how and why we know not, by 
some stern necessity. Being warned and guided by 
this principle, devote yourself no longer to the fruitless 
study of theology ; it brings, and can bring with it no 
practical advantage. Seek not to explore the doctrine 
of final causes ; rather, if you speculate at all, confine 
your thoughts to the discussion of phenomena and the 
laws of phenomena. . Such alone are useful and legiti- 
mate subjects of inquiry. It is possible indeed that 
laws may be connected somehow with forms of spirit- 
ual agency; we cannot absolutely say that they are 
not. You may continue, therefore, on this ground to 
follow the established ritual of your ancestors. Sacrifice 
as if your sacrifice were a reality ; worship shin as if 
shin were really present. But meanwhile your chief 
concern is with the visible and palpable universe, and 
with the homely tasks of life." How familiar all this 
seems; but it sounds like a quotation from an article in 
the " Nineteenth Century " or the V Fortnightly Review!' 
And no wonder: the hands are the hands of Confucius, 
but the voice is the voice of Professor Huxley. 

And what of a future state ? Here, too, his teach- 
ings are thoroughly Agnostic. He refuses to derive 
any motives of conduct from the consideration of the 
life beyond. Good and evil are to be recompensed by 
the natural results of conduct here in time. To all in- 
quiries about the future world he turns a cold indiffer- 
ence. One of his followers asked him the question, 
'* What becomes of a man when he has passed from 
the stage of life ? " " While you do not know life," 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 83 

was the reply, "what can you know of death?" He 
does not say that death ends all ; only, " we do not 
know." " Perhaps this present life," he says, " may be 
your last, your sole possession, * * meanwhile 
your chief concern is with the visible and palpable uni- 
verse, and with the homely tasks of life." Well, that 
is Agnosticism pure and unadulterated. Mr. Holyoake 
himself could not put it better. 

With such negations in the place of God and the 
hope of immortality, it is easy to see what Confucius' 
doctrine of sin must be. Take away God, cut down 
the existence of the soul to the span of seventy years, 
and sin loses its essential character. Right and wrong 
are only convertible terms with order and disorder. 
Sin is not a consciousness unique, solitary, mysterious, 
a stain that strikes through to the roots of our being ; 
it is only a natural stage in the development of the 
human animal. And all this is Confucianism. He 
denies that human nature is bad. " Human nature," 
says Mencius, echoing his master, " is good, just as 
water has a tendency to flow downwards ; men are 
universally inclined to virtue, just as water invariably 
flows downwards. Water, by beating may be made to 
splash over your head, and by forcing may be made to 
pass over a mountain ; but who would ever say that 
this is the natural tendency of water? It is because 
violence is applied to it. Thus men can be made vic- 
ious ; but it is by no means their nature." Sin is not 
a fault in the man himself, but only a result of defect 
ive education. Correct his surroundings and give 



o4 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

him healthy. teaching and sin will disappear. And of 
course there is no place for self-condemnation or re- 
morse. Guilt is something of which the Chinese 
philosopher takes no cognizance. He lives for time : 
he is satisfied with the results of time. Things are 
disordered here it is true ; but it only needs patience 
and careful instruction, and above all the cultivation of 
political economy, and all wrongs will be righted, and 
the kingdom of heaven, such a kingdom of heaven as 
is realized in the China of to-day, will come on earth. 

As for the cry of man for his God, Confucius does 
not hear it. The longing of the soul for the infinite, 
the aspiration towards the perfect in character, the sense 
of dependence, the exercise of reverence, the craving 
for spiritual regeneration are to him only the imagery 
of fantastic dreams. 

Confucianism is Agnosticism. Feature by feature it 
answers to that theory of life. In its refusal to consider 
the questions of theology, questions concerning God, 
the Future State, and the reality of sin, in its determi- 
nation to address itself only to the present, the temporal,' 
the earthly, it is the skeptical philosophy of our time. 

And now we are ready for the question, What has 
Agnosticism made of the Chinese ? It has had a fair 
field all to itself, and a sowing of many centuries : what 
kind of civilization does it produce, and what sort of 
kingdom of heaven does it set up ? 

Two features strike us immediately and forcibly in 
considering the civilization of China : its tremendous 
vitality, and its dreary commonplaceness. 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 85 

For more than twenty centuries now the Chinese 
have addressed themselves to the problem of how to 
get the most out of life here. They have simplified 
their problem under the inspiration of Confucius by 
dropping clean out of mind all questions of a theologi- 
cal character, and have concentrated every energy on 
the business of living here. In this they have had a 
great success. They have developed a civilization that 
clings close to its facts, to the seen, the palpable, the 
ponderable, the material ; and these it has mastered. 
An acre of ground in China supports more human life, 
such as it is, than an acre in any other part of the 
world. The human animal there can do more work 
on a smaller amount of nourishment than any other 
human animal on the face of the earth. In the com- 
petition of labor the Chinaman can beat not only the 
Californian, but the European, the negro, the Hindus, 
in a word, every rival. 

And he is not unhappy in his pinched, narrow life. 
He works as hard as the peasant of Germany or the 
artisan of England, but he is incomparably more con- 
tent with his lot. All writers unite in testifying to his 
cheerfulness. There is no enthusiasm wasted ; but 
neither is there any melancholy. The problem before 
him has been to make the most of life here; and to do 
this he has learned to economize feeling. Why waste 
energy and time in unavailing wishes, in dreams of the 
far-off, the supernatural ? As one of their admirers 
has described them, "they are a swarm of plodding 
utilitarians, sternly adherent to the actual and the posi- 



S6 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

tive : * * a matter-of-fact temperament without sa- 
lient ideas or special enthusiasm makes the Chinaman 
push all work into infinitesimal detail." As he has 
stripped life of the imaginative element, and made 
religion to consist in a code of manners and the culti- 
vation of political economy, there is no room left for 
unprofitable longings. Every energy of the soul is 
put to practical work ; there is no expenditure of vital- 
ity in spiritual speculation and aspiration. The China- 
man has learned the art of economizing vital force ; 
and that is an enormous saving. To this should be 
added another great economy which they have 
achieved, viz., their singular freedom from excess of 
nervous sensibility. It is noticed that the Chinese are 
more insensible to pain than other races ; they suffer 
less from nervous irritability after injuries ; they recover 
more quickly from surgical operations. And this is a 
natural result of the strict confinement of nervous 
activity to the uses of things actual and material. Con- 
fucius turned the mind of the race away from all spirit- 
ual contemplations. The result is that the great waves 
of feeling which come and go with the exercise of 
spiritual speculation and emotion, cease. Development 
of sensibility is checked, and you have a race fitted for 
the monotonous round of a life of hard toil. You 
have, too, a race specially qualified for meeting the 
hard, cold facts of life. It is noticed that no race gives 
and takes life with such indifference as the Chinese. 
They exterminate a conquered tribe, or lie down them- 
selves to die by famine, with equal coolness and uncon- 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. Sj 

cern. For this they have been judged to be cruel ; but 
it is not cruelty, it is only the stolidity that results from 
defective nervous sensibility. 

What a persistent, tenacious, indefatigable race of 
workers has Agnosticism made of them ! They have 
solved the problem of how to live cheap, work hard, 
submit stoically to death, and yet be cheerful under it 
all. They are a race of admirable animals. And thus 
far they have vindicated Agnosticism as a working 
theory of life. To lose sight of God, to have no 
thought of a future life, to drop out all sense of sin 
and guilt from the human consciousness, to concentrate 
the whole energy of the mind on the business of living 
here and now, certainly does make of man a powerful, 
tenacious, and cheerful animal. But is such an animal 
worth preserving? Would the kingdom of heaven 
come if the Middle Kingdom were extended over the 
whole earth ? Will the race have reached perfection 
when we are all Chinese ? 

And this brings us to consider the other striking fea- 
ture of Chinese civilization, its commonplaceness. Life 
in China is a dreary dead level of mediocrity. There 
are no depressions and there are no elevations. It is 
one flat plain of common sordid appetites and petty 
desires, all of the earth earthy. There is no progress 
in the nation. Things are there now just as they were 
two thousand years ago. The national mind conceives 
of no possible improvement; things are just as they 
ought to be ; the ideal has been realized ; it was real- 
ized twenty centuries ago. History is only a monoto- 



88 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

nous line of coming and going emperors and dynasties. 
And it is the same with the individual. The Chinese 
child becomes a man in capacity to work ; but he 
never ceases to be childish. St. Paul's declaration that 
when he became a man he put away childish things, 
would illustrate nothing to the Chinese mind, for a 
Chinaman never puts away childish things. He flies 
kites, plays with toys, is consumed with infantile curi- 
osity, at the age of fifty as at five. His maturity is 
only a hardening of muscle and a ripening of the 
meaner processes of the logical faculty ; character 
seems not to develop with manhood. There is no per- 
spective in the Chinese mind any more than there is in 
their art. The blue plates, familiar to our boyish eyes, 
in which the man in the foreground is no bigger than 
his fellow a mile away across the bridge, is at once an 
illustration and a type of Chinese civilization : it is all 
an eternal here and now. They know nothing of lights 
or shades. 

They are, as might be expected, a people devoid of 
humor. It would be as hard to get a joke through a 
Chinaman's head as Sydney Smith affirmed it was to 
introduce it into a Scotchman's. He is, it is true, the 
occasion of mirth in others, but it is at him we smile, 
not with him. No mind, for instance, with the slight- 
est touch of humor could have written the great apos- 
trophe to duty, with its anti-climax, which is attributed 
to Confucius : "You constitute one little member in 
some mighty organism; you stand as part of some 
great moral order; strive to act on all occasions as 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 89 

such a being should act. Far from pausing to bemoan 
your weakness or unworthiness, remember that he who 
offends against heaven has no one to whom he can 
pray. The past is gone and is irrevocable. Be more 
vigilant in time to come." This is very fine : one feels 
his pulse beat quicker to these grand sentiments; but 
now for the climax :." Endeavor so to rule yourself, 
according to the sacred maxims, that you may be fitted 
first to rule a family, and lastly may attain the highest 
point of your ambition — an office under government." 
There is a noble end for the goal of life. It is worthy 
of the utterance of an Andrew Jackson or a Roscoe 
Conkling : " Strive to act as one who is part of a great 
moral order, and you shall have — a post-office ! " A 
congressman might say that seriously ; but how could 
a sage ? Well, he could not if he had a spark of 
humor. But Confucius had none ; and his followers 
for twenty centuries have had none either. 

There is no imagination among them ; that is noth- 
ing of what we know as such. A thin play of fancy 
flutters over their literature and art, like the shimmer 
of light on polished metal ; but for the power that 
builds and weaves and projects before the mind's eye 
its creation of character and life, with their mysteries 
of light and shade, of passion and aspiration, with a 
movement and goal — all this is wanting to the Chinese. 

And there seems to be in them no capacity for en- 
thusiasm, except it be an enthusiasm for making 
money. They have a passion for trade ; but reli- 
gion, patriotism, even the ordinary human affections, 



gO SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

seem to kindle in them no fire. One writer says of 
their humanity, " it ameliorates, but does not recon- 
struct : it has an apathetic and languid air, and does 
not rise to enthusiasm." Now humanity is the one 
virtue, according to the Agnostic, which above all 
others is to survive the decay of religion. If Secular- 
ism is to do anything for us it is to do away the mis- 
eries of man. But the most perfectly worked out Ag- 
nosticism the world has ever seen has lost all nerve or 
spirit for reforming men. 

Of their religion mention has been made before. It 
is a horde of petty maxims -about daily living, with the 
Emperor for its object of supreme reverence, and the 
cultivation of political economy for its highest exercise. 
Its heaven is an office under government, and the 
proper distribution of the post-offices is its ideal of the 
moral order of the universe. And this is the outcome 
of Agnosticism ! 

But it will be said that the immobility and dreary 
commonplaceness of Chinese civilization are not the 
result of Agnosticism, but only an accidental quality 
due to natural temperament, or to some agency con- 
cealed now in their remote past. 

With respect to that, two facts are to be considered. 

First, The fact that at some distant period the Chi- 
nese were possessed of a civilization progressive, highly 
inventive, and fertile in ideas. No one supposes that 
the knowledge of gunpowder, printing, and the mari- 
ner's compass, to say nothing of all the arts and elab- 
orations of a complex social and political structure, 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 9 1 

came to them by revelation from heaven, or by inheri- 
tance from a superior race. There is the existing 
civilization petrified, motionless for 2000 years, but 
carrying in it all the marks of a former age of discov- 
ery and progress. How came this great moving tide 
of civilization to a standstill, to be locked up in this 
frost of centuries ? Concede that the feudal decay of 
the centuries before Confucius gave a pause to the 
movement ; so there was a pause in the civilization of 
Europe when western feudalism declined ; but when 
partial order was restored progress was resumed : it 
was only a pause, not a petrifaction. 

Then there is the other fact, that just at the moment 
when order began to be restored, Confucianism laid its 
grasp on the Chinese mind and turned it decisively 
away from the idea o( God, the future life, sin and 
righteousness, in a word, from the supernatural. Chi- 
nese immobility dates from the establishment of Secu- 
larism or practical Agnosticism, in the form of Con- 
fucianism, as the religion of the nation. This may be 
only a coincidence ; but it is the only fact that throws 
any light at all on this hardest of problems. 

And further, it ought not to be considered an iso- 
lated fact, a mere coincidence ; for it is a fact that falls 
in with our natural expectations. No one will suspect 
M. Renan of an undue bias to theological ideas, but 
he says in his Studies of Religious History, that the 
fact that the Chinese are of. all people the least super- 
naturalist, explains to his mind " the secret of their 
mediocrity." That is to say, to take from man the 



Q2 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

idea of God and immortality, is to narrow his scope. 
Shut him up to time; roof over the heavens above 
him ; for his infinite substitute the indefinite : and you 
have not merely taken from him so much future; you 
have really changed the character of his present. The 
mystery, the greatness, the immeasurable hope of exis- 
tence, all that gives to life its light on the horizon, is 
gone. Life becomes a measured tract — an enclosed 
paddock — so many years, such and such possibilities, 
all bounded and visible — and shut in there to browse, 
man loses with his infinite prospect his infinite elasti- 
city. In short, M. Renan thinks, as most of the great 
thinkers have thought before him, that to paralyze the 
religious nature, is to save the political and social ani- 
mal, but to destroy the subtle, aspiring, creative soul. 
It was this that Tennyson meant when he wrote, 

" Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 

He was not thinking of the contentedness of the 
masses, the relations of labor and capital, the material 
aspects, of the two civilizations ; in that view the China- 
man has the better of the European ; as a working ani- 
mal he far surpasses his European brother. But it 
was the spiritual life, the out- look, the hope, the aspi- 
ration of Europe, alongside of the spiritual apathy and 
languor of China, that pointed the comparison. It was 
the mountain region with its lovely valleys and lofty 
peaks, its rushing streams and rugged gorges, by the 
side of the flat levels of the lowlands. 

Attention enough, it seems to me, has not been paid 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 93 

to this aspect of the transformation which must be 
effected in human nature by the suppression of its 
spiritual side. We have been told what vast energies 
of the intellect were wasted on the speculations of 
theology ; the word scholasticism represents that ter- 
rible expenditure ; for scholasticism was the gulf that 
for two centuries swallowed up the most of the mental 
force of Europe. We know, too, what a world of pas- 
sionate hopes, what a treasure of enthusiasm, of lofty 
aspirations, and high dreams, was sunk in religious 
controversy. It is easy to deplore this, and to paint a 
picture of what might have been done if the scholars 
who spent centuries in going in doors only to come 
out of them again, had devoted their subtlety and per- 
sistence to the problems of real life. But who can tell 
us what the human mind itself will be when once the 
spiritual world is closed up as only waste land ? You 
can calculate how much energy will be saved by ceas- 
ing to think barrenly about God and immortality ; but 
can you tell how much spiritual energy will be left in 
men who do not believe in God or a future life at all ? 
Such a condition of things would be to the mental 
economy what the reduction of all the earth's moun- 
tains to plains would be to the material economy. 
There would be more land to plough, but a great deal 
less of the forces that make it worth plowing. And 
Agnosticism is neither more nor less than an attempt 
to level the highlands of human nature, its solitary 
peaks of faith and aspiration, to the flat level of the 
plains. The plea is that mountains are oniy barren 



94 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

and uninhabitable places, and that once levelled they 
would grow so much more corn. But reduce human 
nature to the plain of mere existence, to the well-being 
of the body, and the cultivation of the trading and 
social faculties, and what sort of spiritual force would 
you have left ? The answer, it seems to me, is given 
in the plains of China. That huge mass of four hun- 
dred millions of human beings, with no humor, no 
enthusiasm, no aspiration, no progress, no faith, no 
hope, no future, that crowd of toiling animals ' eager 
for gain, indifferent to life, dull, monotonous, common- 
place, sullen, is the answer. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold finds fault with Bishop Butler 
for making the full coming of the Kingdom of God to 
depend on the intervention of God Himself. "Butler," 
he says, " decides that good men cannot now unite suf- 
ficiently to bring this better society about ; that it can- 
not, therefore, be brought about in the present known 
course of nature, and that it must be meant to come to 
pass in another world beyond the grave." Not so, says 
Mr. Arnold ; we do not need, for the kingdom of God 
to come, to have a future state, nor a personal God, nor 
any fathomless distinction between sin and righteous- 
ness. He thinks we may find an immortality in being 
generous and unselfish here ; that we may have the 
aspiration and joy, the inextinguishable hope and spirit- 
ual longing that belong to the idea of God and eternity, 
without God or eternity. He bids us believe that when 
we have ceased to spend our energies in arguing about 
a God in whose existence we firmly believe, and take 



THE CHINESE PROBLEM. 95 

to living to a God in whose existence we do not believe 
at all, that then the kingdom of God will come. 

Well, Confucius persuaded the Chinese to try that 
experiment: "Devote yourself," he said, " no longer 
to the fruitless study of theology * * your chief 
concern is with the visible and palpable universe, and 
with the homely tasks of life * * be thoughtful, 
therefore, be industrious ; make the most of what you 
have ; be modest, sober, grave, decorous ; cultivate the 
qualities which mark the man of the due medium * 
* and at last you may attain the highest point of 
your ambition — an office under government." And 
the Chinese tried it. They gave up theology ; they 
dropped the fairy-tale of immortality; they turned 
their backs on God, and gave themselves to practical 
things, and to culture — to tne cultivation especially of 
political economy, that noble science, to which Mr. 
Andrew White, of Cornell, so ardently urges our young 
men to devote themselves. They realized Professor 
Huxley's ideal of attending only to what they could 
see, and know, and verify. They followed out Mr. 
Arnold's gospel of seeking to establish by culture a 
Kingdom of God here. And they have it. They en- 
tered it a long time ago. The Emperor, the Son and 
Representative of Heaven, is their substitute for God ; 
to become a mandarin of nine buttons is their entrance 
into heaven. They have mastered the problem of get- 
ting rice enough for all, of being cheerful without hope 
and satisfied with the commonplace. They have a 
kingdom of God of mediocrity and dreary immobility. 



g6 SELECTIONS fc FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Their New Jerusalem is a city where nothing changes, 
nothing happens ; there are no dreams there, no future, 
no aspiration ; nothing but rice illimitable, and the 
prospect of getting an office under government. 

Behold the kingdom of God is among them ! but who 
would enter it ? 

(Reprinted by permission from The Lutheran Quarterly for July, 1879.) 



THE SECRET OF CHRISTMAS, 



Christmas has come to mean so many things that it 
is easy to miss what is really essential in it, the mean- 
ing which alone gives significance to all others. It is 
like the pealing of a bell in the hills; the valleys and 
ridges take it up and toss it back and forth till we can 
hardly distinguish the original sound from the echoes. 
Christmas has a great many echoes. 

Go down into the thronged streets as the bright sea- 
son comes near, and ask one and another its meaning. 
One says, " Christmas means joy: it is the pledge and 
the realization of what we are so apt to forget, that 
there is a great joy in life." Well, that is true. A 
Christmas without joy would be like a spring without 
blossom. But then the blossoms are not spring; they 
do not even express all the meaning of spring. 

Another says, " Christmas means kindliness and the 
opening of human affections." To his ear, its chimes 
ring out, "Peace on earth, good will to men." And 
that is a still truer answer. Christmas does have that 



THE SECRET OF CHKISTMAS. 97 

power: it softens men's hearts, makes us feel the need 
of the needy, and puts us into sympathy with all. 

Others give it a wider scope. The great festival 
celebrated in common in so many lands, spreading 
every year to new peoples, tells of the growing one- 
ness of the race. It means the breaking down of old 
barriers of national prejudice, race hatred. It prophe- 
sies " the federation of the nations, the parliament of 
the world." And what a grand, true meaning that is ! 
for Christmas, if it is real at all, must point at last to 
that, the binding together of men all over the world in 
one company of brethren. 

To some it is apologetic : it testifies to the power of 
Christianity. To others it is theological : a sign of the 
truth of Christ's redemption. And so we might go on. 
But in none of these, nor in all of them together, is 
really given the picture of what Christmas means at its 
very heart. That must be found in the event itself 
which Christmas celebrates. And that event, when 
once we look at it, how simple, yet how profound it is ! 
A child is born into the world ; but that child is the 
Divine One himself, the great God. It is the meeting 
of infinite power and infinite weakness. It is the com- 
ing of God to man, the drawing near and yet nearer 
of the Father to his lost and bewildered child. 

The meaning, then, of Christmas is, God came to 
us ; God came to man that he might be united to us 
and we to him : the union of God and man. In view 
of that great mystery, that palpable fact, all other 
meanings of Christmas find their true interpretation. 
7 



q8 selections from writings of dr. stork. 

And now that the blessed season comes, with all its 
familiar brightness and hallowed memories, how can 
we feel that it is a real Christmas to us individually, 
unless we get at its very heart and are assured that 
God has, indeed, come to us? Christmas and its cel- 
ebration ought to be a very personal matter, for it 
expresses a personal relation. The message to the 
shepherds, " Unto you is born this day a Saviour," 
each Christian must translate into a particular, per- 
sonal message to himself. He must hear the angels 
saying " Unto thee," and know that it was not only to 
man in general, but unto him in particular, the glad 
tidings are sent. Unless by faith we can do that, our 
Christmas falls short of what Christ meant it to be. 
I know, as season after season comes again, it is often 
hard to make the message a reality. Cares and anxi- 
eties parching the dew of our youth, suffering, break- 
ing the elasticity of the spirit, make Christ's salvation 
seem a very far-off thing. What are we to do then ? 
When Christmas comes and calls us, and the world 
has been filling our souls with its prosperity or its bit- 
terness, making the message an unreal, impossible 
thing is there any help? 

I know of no better way than to do as the shepherds 
did. " Let us go now," they said, " and see this thing 
which is come to pass." And so they went and saw 
the Child. Christmas is really Christmas only as we 
come near and see Jesus. 

How much the New Testament makes of that simple 
experience of immediate personal contact, seeing Jesus ! 



THE SECRET OF CHRISTMAS. 99 

When Nathanael objected that one from Nazareth 
could not be the Messiah, Philip says, "Come and 
see:" if he once saw Jesus, his doubts would be dis- 
solved. At Samaria the noblest seekers after truth 
were satisfied only when they saw and heard Christ for 
themselves. " Now we believe," they said, rf for we 
have heard him ourselves, and know that this is the 
Christ, the Saviour of the world." It is that mysteri- 
ous, inexplicable power which is found in personal con- 
tact that is meant here. Something came to them from 
the great presence, the deep eyes, the penetrating tones, 
which satisfied. They felt the Divine ; all doubts were 
dissolved, all needs met. They saw him and were 
drawn into the great current of his life, and became one 
with him. 

No Christmas does for us what it ought unless it re- 
news that sense of divine touch; and no Christmas will 
do that for us until, first of all, we get away from the 
noise and laughter and gay confusion, to look alone 
upon Jesus. Then, when we have seen him, felt his 
divine touch renewing our love and faith — then, like 
the shepherds and the Wise Men, we can come back 
to rejoice. There is such a thing as making our Christ- 
mas time "dark with excess of light;" there is so much 
splendor in the shop windows, so much bustle on the 
street, so much merrymaking and jollity, so much pub- 
licity and general rejoicing, that we lose the quiet, 
sweet, peaceful sense of the divine life touching ours. 
Is it not so with many Christians ? The season comes 
and goes and leaves them dry. Not because they are 



IOO SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

in any special way wrong, but because they have made 
their Christmas so much a thing of the outside. The 
trimming of the Christmas tree, the selection of gifts, 
the party going, the feasting, even the religious exer- 
cises, the decoration of the churches, the Christmas 
music, the Christmas benevolence, all are outward. 
Then at the end a bad taste is in the mouth. It is not 
because this outward brightness, merriment, public ex- 
ercise, social hilarity is wrong; but because it has not 
found its true root. 

Begin with the cradle in the manger, the sacred head 
that lies low with the beasts of the stall, the group of 
rude shepherds, and the seeking Wise Men worshiping 
before the infant Jesus, and then all the splendor and 
the universal joy which have flowed out from that dark 
stable in the inn will seem perfectly right. 

First Jesus ; then what he does for us, and his gifts 
and the flood of joy he pours out on a heavy laden 
world. When we see him, touch him, we come to 
the centre; we receive in that union and communion a 
divine unction that makes us able to estimate rightly 
all the many meanings of Christmas. Then the frolic 
of the children, the widespread joy, the brightness and 
mirth of the season fall into their proper place; then \ve 
can enjoy all, and feel the love and presence of Christ 
pervading all. — (L. 0., Dec, 1883) 



THE GROWING LIFE. 10 1 

THE GROWING LIFE. 



In St. Paul's life there is always apparent a struggle 
after something better. While he can say of all his 
surroundings that he is content, he is never satisfied 
with the progress he has made himself. It is a small 
thing to him whether he live coarsely or delicately, in 
a luxurious or plain dwelling, is at leisure or crowded 
with work; but that he, Paul, should not be increasing 
in what really makes life, is not to be borne. He 
must get on. And this applies not so much to his 
work as to his own character. It does apply to his 
work : he is ever seeking new fields, dreaming of new 
conquests of souls, planning fresh enterprises. But 
not dissevered from these, and yet a wholly distinct 
aim, is his thirst to go on in his own inner life with 
God. 

It was so when he was yet a Pharisee. He re- 
counts what he sacrificed and how he toiled to realize 
in that poor, dry way his ideal of righteousness, of be- 
ing near and acceptable to God. His conversion was 
not a conversion from irreligion to religion, but from 
one kind of religion to another; not from vice or 
worldliness to an honest service, but from a self-chosen 
service to one given him from God. And when he 
became a Christian, after the first bewilderment of the 
shock was over, once on his feet again, we see him the 
same Paul, bracing himself for the race; only now 
his goal is to know perfectly a beloved Lord and 
friend, his ideal is to be like the lovely Christ, his 



102 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

thirst is to be filled with his life, the condescending 
Jesus, the mighty and holy God. 

That, I think, describes what is most characteristic in 
the great Apostle ; not his wonderful genius, his tire- 
less energy, his power over men, but his impassioned 
longing for perfection in the fellowship of Christ. He 
was actually one of the most practical and busy of 
men. His life seemed to be all out of doors. To find 
him you must go into the market-place, in the thickest 
of the crowd. But what drove him there was the deep 
sense of the riches of Christ and the intense longing 
that the blessedness he was grasping might be put 
into the hands of all men. " I am debtor both to the 
Greeks, and to the barbarians ; both to the wise, and 
the unwise ; so, as much as in me is, I am ready to 
preach the gospel to you of Rome also. For it is the 
power of God unto salvation to every one that believ- 
eth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." In 
reality he was a mystic, a soul loving to lose itself in 
the communion of Christ. 

Take his experience in his Epistle to the Philippians: 
" I count all things but loss for the excellency of the 
knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord : * * * * 
that I may know him." " I count not myself to have 
apprehended : but this one thing I do, forgetting those 
things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those 
things which are before, I press toward the mark for 
the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus." 
As we read that grand passage, we see not the great 
preacher, the founder of churches, the converter of 



• THE GROWING LIFE. IO3 

men, the active propagator of a new faith, but a soli- 
tary soul forgetting all else in the vision of the glory 
of the perfect life of Christ. For the instant, there is 
to him, in the universe but one being beside himself — 
that is Christ, the condescending, incarnate God. To 
be united to him, to be like him, to be filled with him, 
is blessedness unalloyed; he is rapt, held enchanted 
with this hope. Does not this tell us something of the 
Source of his activity? At Vaucluse, in southern 
France, a large river, the Sorgues, flows from a single 
spring. At the foot of a lofty mountain cliff sleeps a 
pool so pure, so still, you can scarcely tell where air 
begins and water ends. Up from its deep basin wells 
the silent stream; as it rises unruffled it seems a 
motionless lake, but it glides till the brink is reached; 
then it rushes on, a mighty, growing river, down the 
vale, turning the wheels of factories and mills. That 
is a picture of what the Apostle's mystical life of con- 
templation of Christ and communion with him, is to 
his tremendous energy as a worker among men. Out 
of the depths of that still contemplation, wells up the 
power that marks the grand Apostle to the Gentiles, 
the most tireless of workers. 

But here the likeness ceases. With many men, the 
active service of God begins, as with Paul, in a vision 
of the blessedness of the life in Christ. In them, too, 
out of the still depths of devotion to the Master flows 
the stream of activity. But with many, as the stream 
flows, the spring that feeds it grows shallow. How 
common is this experience ! The life that begins with 



104 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

deep devotion goes forth in eager service, and then 
dwindles : the preacher does not preach with the same 
power, the layman is not so effective in work, the 
Christian life at home is less and less influential. It 
seems strange that it is assumed as almost a law of re- 
ligious life that energy should lessen with time. But 
the secret is an open one. With St. Paul and those 
like him, the stream of activity is always full and 
mighty, because the deep reservoir of communion with 
God, of contemplation and ardent longing to know 
Christ better was welling up afresh. To the Apostle 
there is no bound to the depth and scope of this knowl- 
edge and communion. He recognizes this in his own 
case : at the end of a long life he says, " I count not 
myself to have apprehended." He is a discoverer who 
has landed on the shore of a new continent ; a little 
way inward he has explored the rich, strange lands ; 
but beyond, in endless reaches, stretches a new world 
to be explored and possessed. He cannot sit still, he 
must go on to know that glorious realm. He recog- 
nizes that in the nature of the case the end can never 
be reached; the communion of the soul with God can 
never grow stale, for God is always new. Go on, he 
says, to " know the love of Christ, which passeth 
knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness 
of God." 

Here, then, we have the simple plan of that great 
and growing life. His aim was to be more and more 
one with Christ; and to reach this, he knew no better 
way than to cherish a deepening communion with 



THE GROWING LIFE. IO5 

Christ. This plan might be formed and carried out, if 
Christ and St. Paul were the only beings in the uni- 
verse : it is a life intensely individual, personal ; but it 
is a life, too, that is most sympathetic with all other 
life, and surest to do the best work for men and God. 

It is very simple ; but how easily we miss its essen- 
tial elements ! Every Christian has for his aim this 
union to Christ; but we are continually forgetting that 
the growth of this union comes from communion. 
We think that doing Christian work, cultivating Chris- 
tian tempers, caring for our conduct, is the way to 
deepen this union; but it is not so. All these things 
come after — they are the fruit, not the root. So if 
we find it necessary to abridge anything, it is the mys- 
tical part we give up ; it is the hour of communion, 
not the hour of work, that we are apt to sacrifice. We 
think we can do with less devotion, less communion 
with God, less study of the character of Christ. We 
can afford better to spend a day in which we have not 
been alone with Christ, than a day in which we have 
done no outward work for him. We think it better to 
cultivate the little strip of new life we already know, 
than to explore more deeply the great realm he opens 
to us in the knowledge and fellowship of himself. 
What a mistake ! And the greater the stress of work 
calling us, the more apt we are to fall into it. The 
outward call is so much louder than the inward. 

But if we would do work in the untiring spirit of 
the Apostle, we must first seek Christ, with his thirst 
for union and communion with Christ. As teachers, 



106 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

workers in the church, ministers, leaders of others, 
our deepest need is closer union with Christ — more 
communion with him. The hour when by the patient 
endurance of suffering, or the pondering of his Word, 
or the still, rapt contemplation of the soul fixed on 
him, we are apart from all else, is the hour when the 
soul grows. Then most rapidly we are going on to 
know Christ: then we are more filled with the power 
which makes life full and strong, for ourselves and for 
others.— (L. 0., Dec. 1883) 



CHRIST'S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. 



John iv. 7, 27. There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: 
Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink. 

And upon this came his disciples, and marvelled that he talked with 
the woman. 

These words bring before us the strangely inter- 
esting figure of the woman of Samaria. What a 
stained and tattered piece of humanity she is ! and yet 
even about her rags there lingers an air of interest. 
Tt is the charm which belongs to every figure in the 
Gospel that has once met Jesus and helped us to see 
him. For a few moments she came into the circle of 
his special regard, and ever since a fragrance has 
clung to her. I suppose many of us have felt, what 
seemed at times, an unreasonable tenderness for this 
poor creature, because of her association with Christ. 
But after all there is something more here than mere 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. IO7 

association. She interests us, I think, because she 
illustrates a great truth about Christ and his revela- 
tion of God to us. It is the truth that it is only as 
Christ meets men, and their sin and shame call out 
his sympathy and salvation that we discover what a 
great rich Saviour he is. It is even more — it is the 
truth that the inscrutable God is revealed to us as a 
real, loving, lovable personality by the contact of 
man's sin and misery. 

Look at that figure of Jesus sitting by the well : 
how inscrutable, mysterious, his being, his thoughts ; 
and then this poor, light creature comes, and at the 
touch of her sin and need we see his heart unfold its 
treasures of wisdom and love. The great billow rolls 
over the deep without a sound, almost without form 
till it strikes the shore and then out of its bosom bursts 
the dazzling foam, the rainbow in the spray, the music 
of the surf, all the wonder and life of the breaking 
wave. The ugly rock has revealed to us the beauty 
of the sea. So man and his sin reveal to us God and 
his glory; this sinful Samaritan helps us to see the 
beauty of the spotless Saviour. 

That is not a solitary case. It happens in the gos- 
pels again and again. Thomas in his reckless doubt 
cries " Except I shall see, ... I will not believe," 
and then over that hard incredulity breaks a great 
rich word of Christ. " Blessed are they that have not 
seen, and yet have believed." Man's doubt reveals 
Christ's power to call forth a deep peaceful faith. We 
all owe these faulty men and women in the gospel a 



108 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

debt for what they show us of Christ. We owe a 
debt to this poor creature of Samaria. How many she 
has unconsciously helped on in their way. Many a 
preacher has learned from her interview with Christ 
how to preach. Many a teacher has looked over the 
head of his stupid scholars and seeing the great 
teacher with his stupid scholar, has learned patience. 

Let us try to understand what this scene of Jesus 
talking with the woman of Samaria tells us. // illus- 
trates Christ's sweet reasonableness towards men. 

Two things appear here : 

1st. Christ's feeling towards men. 

2d. His treatment of men which springs out of that 
feeling. 

First, as to Christ's feeling towards men. That lies 
at the root of his whole method. We can never un- 
derstand Christ's dealing with men unless we catch 
his feeling for them. Look at them from the com- 
mon sense point of view, that of the man of the world, 
who says he knows men, meaning that he knows their 
badness and meanness, knows them as sharp buyers 
and sellers, wasteful servants, tricky politicians, foolish 
neighbors — look at men so, and Christ's treatment of 
them will seem absurd. I have no doubt the Jews 
thought, Christ's going home to dine with Zaccheus, 
not only an uncleanness, but also a ridiculous bit of 
softness. A son of Abraham, indeed! What had 
Abraham to do with such a renegade and extortioner? 
We know what Simon, the Pharisee, thought of 
Christ's treatment of the woman who was a sinner. 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. IOQ 

Instead of exciting his admiration, it only led him to 
infer that Christ did not know much about human 
nature. 

But one of Christ's blessings to us is that he has 
taught us that man has a nature really precious and 
salvable. Christ's life was continually saying, " The 
Son of man is come to seek and to save that which 
was lost;" well, then, he must be worth saving. When 
the great God came down to earth and lay a babe in 
the cradle at Bethlehem, the lesson began: "Yes, 
man is worth saving ;" and all along to the end, to the 
cross on calvary, to the ascension to heaven, every 
new scene repeated it over and over. " Man is dear to 
God; he is the lost child; he is God's broken image, 
the beautiful although corrupted image of the glorious 
God." We read it in every picture of the Saviour's 
gentleness and pity ; we hear it in every word of balm 
from his lips. It is the golden thread running through 
the story of Zaccheus, of the woman who was a 
sinner, of the young ruler whom Jesus loved, of the 
Prodigal Son, of the weeping over Jerusalem. They 
all tell us of some wonderful attraction to the heart 
of Jesus in the poor waifs and strays which drift by 
him along the streets and lanes of Palestine. 

And now here the same story is repeated. Jesus sits 
weary by the well. He has traveled far, and is faint 
with hunger and fatigue; the dust of travel is on him: 
how dull life and all things seem at such times. But 
now a foot-step comes along the road. He looks up : 
it is only a poor woman of the town carrying her water- 



I 10 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

jar on her head, one of the dull toiling millions, a beast 
of burden, a mere lump of appetites and sordid habits. 
But Christ speaks to her ; something in her draws his 
heart ; and when the disciples return he has forgotten 
hunger and fatigue : " I have meat to eat that ye know 
not of." That interest overpowering the weariness of 
the body tells us how deep is the love of man in 
Christ's soul. The soul triumphs over the body again 
and again when it loves. The soldier forgets the long 
march at the sound of the bugle blown for battle. The 
weary mother leaps up unwearied at her child's cry of 
pain. And Jesus, when a wretched soul comes before 
him, for the love of what is in it to be, for the yearn- 
ing to wake the deaf nature and make it hear the voice 
of God, to open the blind eyes to see the glory of good- 
ness, feels no more the dust and toil of the way. 

We need to feel deeply this preciousness of every 
soul to Christ in its possibilities, both to learn to love 
him intimately, and to learn to love our fellow men. 

We need to see Christ's tender regard for men to make 
our admiration of his perfection near and warm and 
close. Take away that yearning of his heart, that inef- 
fable pity for the Father's image defaced in men, and 
then Christ's perfection is very beautiful and glorious ; 
but it is perfect as the snow-peak is perfect. It dazzles; 
it freezes. It is a cold, unearthly, hopeless beauty. Our 
hearts chill into despair as we see that immaculate 
whiteness over against our stains. What can such a 
Christ be to me but a far-off, frozen peak of glory? 
But now see him come near ! See him bend his eye 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. I I I 

on Zaccheus; on this poor, draggled thing. Does he 
frown ? Is he revolted at her uncleanness ? No, be- 
neath the stain and folly he sees something better. 
Tenderly he lifts away one layer of vileness after an- 
other, and there below all we see what he sees, the 
soul with its wonderful possibility of angelhood. He 
breathes on it, and the faded lineaments of God start 
out. "See," he says, "that is what you can be." And 
then we feel what it is that has drawn him to earth, 
to Bethlehem, to Calvary, to me. Then in that vision 
of what he sees in our future, that possible likeness 
to himself traced through our disguises we feel that we 
can love such a Saviour intimately. We have some- 
thing in common with him. We are not like him, 
but we may become so. We are poor sinners, but we 
may be shining saints. The whiteness that is in him 
shall be ours one day, for he recognizes it, promises it. 
And then the far-off glittering peak softens into a flush, 
as the snow-peaks glow when the evening falls. 

We need this knowledge of Christ, too, to learn to 
love our fellow-men. Sometimes when we look at the 
people we meet along the streets, the servants in the 
kitchen, the loafers on the corners, the politicians at 
the grocery, we wonder if it is really possible to feel a 
drawing to all men. We all have our poor, mean side, 
and sometimes that side is so conspicuous that we 
seem even to ourselves unlovable. I suppose we 
never really cease to care for ourselves in an instinctive 
way of benevolence, to see that all our wants are sup- 
plied ; but there are times when we do not feel any 



112 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

particular drawing to ourselves; we see our bad quali- 
ties, we are in a state of self-disgust. We are such bad 
company that we would like, if possible, to get away 
from ourselves. I suppose we all know what that feel- 
ing is. Much more is it true with reference to those 
about us. How repelling they often are ! Is it possi- 
ble to find in them that which drew Christ to this 
world, to individual men, to this poor ugly soul? 
The only possible way is to learn how from Christ. 
He has made it possible. By his death for every 
man he has stamped a new value on every one. 
Sometimes old gold gets so tarnished and battered, 
that it is hard to tell it from brass; but if we turn it 
over and find the Hall mark on it we are satisfied. So 
Christ's cross has stamped its value in each man's 
soul. We may say over each, Christ tasted death for 
every man — for this man ; and then we recognize his 
value. The first step, then, to learning to love men, is 
to see them always with the shadow of the cross on 
them. And the next, is to see them as Jesus meets 
them, to see Zaccheus going home with Christ, to see 
the woman weeping at the Saviour's feet in Simon's 
house, to see this Samaritan with Jesus at the well. 

Now let us see what way of treating men springs 
out of Christ's feeling for them. I have described it 
as a method of sweet reasonableness. As we read the 
story sympathetically trying to let the whole scene 
make its own atmosphere about us, we get this general 
impression about the whole manner of Christ apart 
from the particular thing he teaches, and that is of 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. II3 

the wonderful wisdom and truth of his dealing, and 
then that this wisdom and truth is bathed in an at- 
mosphere of personal tenderness and warmth. The 
two together we may describe as a sweet reasonable- 
ness. The two things do not always go together. 
Sometimes there is a reasonableness in those who ap- 
proach us which is the last refinement of aggravation. 
A reasonableness which is more anxious to prove me 
wrong than to make me right, which opens my faults, 
but has no pity for me who am so faulty, which, in 
short, lacks the personal element of sympathy, is a 
reasonableness that drives sinful men to be more sinful. 
Is there anything more exasperating than the bland, 
" I told you so," of one who has been wiser than we? 
And, then, on the other hand, there is a sweetness 
which is of no more help to a poor sinner struggling 
with sin than the fragrance of the violets on the bank, 
to one who is struggling in the stream. The pity 
which is only sorry for us, but can show us no light, 
puts out no strong hand, may be sweet, but what is 
sweetness without strength and light and hope? Now 
Christ's treatment of men is neither helplessly pitiful, 
nor coldly sagacious. The hand he puts out to us is 
both strong and warm. Its touch thrills with tender- 
ness, and braces with power. All this, I think, is il- 
lustrated by his conversation with the Samaritan 
woman. 

Observe how lofty is his appeal. He speaks to her 
sense of what is good and true. At first sight, what 
could be more unwise and hopeless ? She is wretch- 



I 14 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

edly ignorant, steeped in prejudice, and dull with the 
worst of stupidities, the dullness vice brings. And yet 
Jesus talks to her of a God who is a spirit ; tells her of a 
spiritual worship ; speaks of the water that is to spring 
up to eternal life ; unveils her particular sin to her 
conscience. Is that the way to reach a dull sinner? 
But that is the very reasonableness of Christ. And 
is it not reasonable? If man is capable of the salva- 
tion of goodness at all, there must be something in 
him that will respond to the voice of truth, the voice 
of God. If there is not, then there is no hope for him, 
and it is useless to go to him at all. The wisdom of 
Christ shines in the fearless appeal he makes to the 
depths of man's nature. He says, here is a child of 
God, erring, blind, rebellious, corrupted, but still with 
some strings in the wonderful harp not yet frayed 
quite away, the chord of conscience, of spiritual un- 
rest, of hunger for God; let us strike them. And then 
he puts his hand on them, and at his touch, lo, the 
poor rusted strings long unsounded answer; discord- 
antly, harshly, but they answer. The man wonders to 
hear them himself. How often that happened. Think 
of Zaccheus, the publican, despised of all; was there 
anything in that covetuous heart to answer to words 
about salvation? But Jesus tries him; the chord an- 
swers, " Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, 
and if I have taken anything by false accusation, I re- 
store fourfold." Take one at the other end of the 
social scale, that scribe above whose petty question 
about commandments Christ lifted the ereat standard 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. I 1 5 

of truth and let it float on the breeze, "Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and thy neighbor 
as thyself." How the deep chord responded out of 
his narrow heart, " Master, thou hast said the truth, to 
love God with all the soul, and his neighbor as him- 
self is more than all." You will think of many such. 
Christ's reasonableness, then, is that he thinks the 
truths of God and righteousness not too high for men. 
And that has been the power of all who have come 
after Christ. Paul preached to Felix of righteousness, 
temperance, and judgment to come: did he not trem- 
ble? What had ever made the proud Roman quail 
before? Think of the preaching at Ephesus to the 
worldly crowd which made them bring their precious 
books to be burned. So have all the great preachers 
done. But how slow we are to learn that ! We think 
we must dilute truth, make it palatable, begin with 
worldly consideration, appeal to the lower part of 
human nature first, and so educate it up. But not so 
is the heart reached. It is one of the paradoxes which 
are forever puzzling men that one man comes to a 
body of his fellows and appeals to the bad low mo- 
tives in them, and they answer him back in badness 
and baseness, and then another comes and appeals to 
what is high and holy, and the answer of high heroism, 
self-denial, comes from the same men. How can it 
be? Why, it is because there is in man the earthly 
and the heavenly, what God made and does not let 
wholly die, and what sin has made him. Appeal to the 
low, sensual, devilish, and he is a low, sensual, devilish 



Il6 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

creature; and appeal to the high, holy, heroic, and the 
high, heroic string sounds. It appears in a congrega- 
tion. One preacher comes with his low faith in men 
and God, his philosophy of managing men, of getting 
them to do right by appealing to self-interest, of mak- 
ing them liberal by playing on their vanity, pride, 
worldliness, and lo, he has presently a worldly, selfish, 
vain church ; and there comes another man who takes 
Christ's method and tells them of God and good- 
ness, of holiness and self-denial, and lo, they answer to 
that. You know it in yourself. You are thrown in 
contact with one who does not believe in anything 
good, a skeptic as to human virtue, and you are 
shocked to find how his evil sneer rouses echoes out 
of the lair of your soul; you feel a stirring to life of 
mean thoughts, selfish plans, base passions. And 
then God sends into your life some one who is high 
and holy, and as he tells of what he loves and lives in, 
something in you responds; better thoughts come 
flocking out of the dark corners of your soul. It was 
said of a certain army officer that he made his men 
better by always taking it for granted that they wanted 
to be better. That was the meaning of the power 
of Nelson's signal at Trafalgar. " England expects 
every man to do his duty;" and every man that day 
did his duty. " It is a shame," Dr. Arnold's boy at 
Rugby used to say, " not to study and keep the school 
rules, for the doctor expects it so hopefully of us." 
It is always so. Believe in men's capacity for good 
things, and you help to make them good. Believe in 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. II7 

the power of divine truth to stir men towards God, 
and already you have begun to stir them. I believe 
half the power of men who have greatly won men to 
God, has been their copying of Christ in this one 
thing, that they came to men not only with a deep be- 
lief in God, but also in a strong faith in the power of 
the greatest, purest truths about him to wake an an- 
swer in lost souls. We fail, we always fail, and we 
ought to fail when we go to men with a low appeal; 
when we put out of sight the great truths of righteous- 
ness and its blessedness, and the hatefulness and guilt 
of sin, when we hide the cross and its pain and shame 
and awe, because we fear men are not high enough 
to respond to such things. Not so Paul. " I am not 
ashamed of the gospel of Christ, it is the power of 
God unto salvation." " I determined to know nothing 
among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified." 
What a lofty, solemn, holy preaching that was ; and 
how men answered to it, base slaves, victims of vice, 
proud philosophers and self-righteous Jews. Nothing- 
is too high to bring to men in sin, for they are made 
for a high destiny, the strings God strung in them are 
there, and our business is to strike them boldly. 

But will men answer to such high appeals? That 
leads us to another feature of Christ's treatment of 
men. His appeal is high, but its approach is sympa- 
thetic. He begins, you see, with this woman on her 
own ground. He stoops to enter the low portal. 
"Jesus saith unto her, give me to drink." Then by a 
gradual modulation, he passes from the chord of her 



1 1 8 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

awakened interest to his one great theme of God and 
his grace, the divine life and its blessedness. He 
touches two of the familiar springs of her life, her daily 
work, and her sense of humanity. He begins where 
she can meet him. That is indispensable. If we are 
really to help men, we must go where they are, enter 
on their ground, see and feel what they see and feel. 
It is curious to observe how the highest and the lowest 
appeal to men come down to the same gate. One 
man goes to his neighbor to get out of him a dollar 
or a vote; another goes to win him to God; and they 
both come and knock at the same door. They put 
themselves alongside of him, find out his tastes, inter^ 
ests, ways. They get him to go their way by first 
going a little way with him. And what is the lowest 
baseness in one, is the highest nobleness in the other. 
How near together, and yet how far apart, they are. 
Jesus talking to the woman of her daily work and 
offering her a better water, looks like a trader playing 
on the peculiar tastes of a customer; but they are 
worlds apart. The trader pretends a sympathy for his 
own ends, while Jesus really pities the dull drudge 
toiling at what can never satisfy, and goes with her to 
the well to get her to see the deeper, truer well. It is 
just because under the common thought and toil of 
each man he meets, he sees a deeper vein, a nobler 
toil he is capable of, that he is really interested in what 
he is and does. 

We ought to see clearly the difference between pre- 
tending to care for a man's individual likings to do him 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. I 19 

good, and really caring so much for him that all his 
genuine ways are of real interest to us. For I do not 
believe that any mere pretense of sympathy will ever 
open any man's heart to the best work for him. A 
politician may get a vote or a trader a dollar by pre- 
tending an interest he does not feel ; but votes and 
dollars are cheap things. If you want to get hold of 
what is really precious in a man, not his vote or his 
dollar, but his conscience, his spiritual nature, your in- 
terest must be genuine. Ah, there is the difficulty. I 
think we could be capable of working up an interest in 
a man's ways to win him to something better, but to 
really have the interest, that is a different matter. 

That Christ teaches us. But how? By the free 
play of benefit between himself and this stranger. He 
asks a favor: "Give me to drink." There was a 
barrier between the Jew and the Samaritan, a double 
barrier of religious bigotry and caste pride. Christ 
simply treats it as though it were not. He is in need, 
and here is a fellow-creature who can help him. He 
frankly asks her. At once a sympathy is established; 
not something pretended, but the real sympathy of 
the helped and the helper. We are often shut out 
from men by refusing to take or ask benefits from 
them; we are too proud, or independent, or too ticklish 
of our dignity, too exclusive. In Marblehead, when a 
stranger appeared, the people used to say, " There's a 
stranger; heave a brick at him." And old Herodotus 
tells us how in early days every foreigner along the 
coast of Asia Minor used to be looked on as an enemy. 



120 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

In California they feel so to the Chinamen to-day. 
Now the root of that old feeling is deep in human 
nature. We are apt to think of men not sympathetic- 
ally, but antipathetically. Christ teaches us the better 
way. He lets us see how at every chance meeting with 
men, he felt the attraction of a common humanity: 
" He also is a son of Abraham;" "I must abide at thy 
house." " She, too, is a child of our father ;" " Give me 
to drink." Let us exchange good offices. And so he 
lets his wish of help for her go out to her. He marks 
her burden; she is a water-carrier, and with the 
thought of her life-long toil, honest, necessary toil, 
but that at last must leave her athirst forever, his 
longing goes out to her. He wishes her life was not 
all mere drudgery — that she knew the deep well of the 
divine life, the water that quenches the soul's thirst in 
eternal joy. How natural that is! What a real inter- 
est we see springing up. But is that not possible in 
us for men about us, too? Did you never, when you 
have seen a sharp business-man hitting the mark, en- 
larging his trade, and you have noted his earnestness, 
clear-headedness, the joy he took in his work, did you 
never feel a pang of pity, that after all he was only 
blowing golden bubbles to float awhile and then break 
on the grave's edge? Did you not wish you could 
get him to see the solid realities of eternity, and en- 
gage that bright energy to be rich towards God? Or, 
did you never watch a mother so anxious for her boy, 
so proud of him, so happy in his happiness, and not 
wish she could learn to love her Saviour w ith the same 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. 12 1 

loyal, self-sacrificing affection? Or, perhaps it is a col- 
lege lad, ambitious, eager for praise, set on achieve- 
ment, thinking what he will do in the world. Who 
can see such and not long to open his eyes to see 
what St. Paul saw, the race of eternal life, the arena 
where men and angels watch the struggle, the judge 
who holds the crown and waits to give, " to them who 
by patient continuance in well-doing, seek for glory 
and honor and immortality — eternal life." 

I am sure Jesus shows us how we may feel a real 
interest in the lives and thoughts of those about us. 
It is to recognize frankly our common human nature, 
to give and take, to really stop long enough by each 
other's side to get the flavor of one another's life. 
Does this seem a little thing? But it was grand 
enough to be one reason for Christ's taking our nature 
upon him. What was the incarnation for? what did 
the great God of eternity become a struggling, learn- 
ing man for? but, as one reason, that he mio-ht have 
just such a sympathy for us, that he could truly have 
a genuine interest in all our individual concerns: "in 
all things it behooved him to be made like unto his 
brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high 
priest . . .for in that he himself hath suffered being 
tempted, he is able also to succor them that are 
tempted." What a picture to hang over the cradle at 
Bethlehem, over the cross on Calvary! Why is the 
glorious God veiled in human flesh? That he might 
stand close by us, feel with us. 

But this is not easv, even for Christ, the master of 



122 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

souls. We are to notice, then, his patience. Some- 
times, men opened to him at once. One word, one 
call, and they turned. But this woman was a stupid, 
empty creature. I think, sometimes, this story was 
written by the Holy Ghost, among other reasons, to 
show how dull, and slow, and trying, a soul that is 
fully worth saving may be. Read her answers to 
Christ's words ; they are the very quintessence of fri- 
volity, of the flightiness which nothing apparently can 
sober and fix. But even that is met. It is met by 
the sweet reasonableness of Christ's patience. Both 
qualities appear in that patience. 

His reasonableness. — We are impatient with men be- 
cause we do not see how thoroughly sin has poisoned 
their nature. Here is a sinner. We go to him with 
the remedy, but he does not care for it, thinks he is 
well enough, laughs, turns it off, and then we are dis- 
gusted. But what is all that frivolity, stupidity, but 
the effect of his sin — nay, his sin itself? How un- 
reasonable to be impatient with the obstinacy we came 
to cure? The clear eye of Jesus sees that continually. 
Behind the flighty talk he sees the wretched soul. He 
reads the dumb longing under the perverseness. We 
are continually misreading the signs of character. 
Dr. Arnold sharply rebuked, one day, what seemed the 
wilful blunders and slowness of a dull scholar. The 
boy burst into tears, and said, " I am doing my best, 
sir." Nothing, the Doctor said, ever cut him like 
that protest. Often if the deeper nature of men could 
speak out to us, after some stupidity or folly that ex- 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. 1 23 

hausts our patience, it would say, too, " I am doing my 
best." That is what Jesus hears behind many a per- 
verse objection, flippant answer, and he is patient. 

But most of all his sweetness appears, the sweetness 
of the unsullied spirit. What makes us intolerant of 
perverseness ? Our own perverseness. Fenelon says, 
in one of his spiritual letters, " It is our imperfection 
which is impatient of the imperfection of others." 
The chord of obstinacy sounds in them, and the 
chord of pride echoes back to it in us. The absence 
of all such impatience tells, as nothing else can, of 
Christ's inward sweetness. " Perfection easily bears 
with the faults of others." The Prince of this world, 
as Christ said, cometh and findeth nothing in him. 
He comes in the stupidity and captiousness he works 
in the children of disobedience, in this woman's empti- 
ness, but he finds nothing to answer in Jesus. But 
when men flout us and make foolish answers, Satan 
finds the old charred brand of temper ready to take 
fire. Is it not sad to go to cure a sick man and find, 
instead, that we only catch his disease? But so it is 
between us and men. Here is a mother with her wil- 
ful child: she is to teach it self-control, and that comes 
first by the lesson of obedience. Its will is a slave to 
passion, and the mother must set it free. But, alas! 
how often instead of teaching our children self-control, 
they make us lose control over our own selves. We fail 
because we are impatient, and we lose patience be- 
cause sin in the little one's heart has called to the sin 
in ours, and that has answered back, and we are be- 



124 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

trayed into temper. That is neither sweet nor reason- 
able. How can you cure the evil in your child, your 
scholar, your friend, if you have not cured it in your 
self? But when Christ comes to the sinner, and the 
sinner's perverseness beats against his love, it never 
ruffles him. He can wait, for evil has no contagion 
for him. How sweet is the grace which sin opposes 
but can not weary. Is not this Christ's infinite reason- 
ableness? And our impatience with men, is it not at 
bottom our unreasonableness and sourness of temper? 
But there is still more in Christ's way with men: 
His Faithfulness to the Truth. When we speak of 
our Lord's life it is almost impossible for us to keep 
the balance true between his sweetness and his right- 
eousness. When we make him gentle, we are apt to 
lose out the strength ; or we make him holy, and 
efface the humanity. The cure for this is to keep 
close to the facts. Take the facts of this interview: 
See how, although so tender, he is uncompromising in 
truth. " He whom thou now hast is not thy husband." 
What an unveiling of her sin ! What an unswerving 
hand lays open the sore in her soul! Here is a 
wounded man, and up rush his foolish friends: they 
weep over him, they kiss him, they bring opiates for 
his pain, but the wound is unhelped. Then comes the 
surgeon; not a tear, not a word; he brushes away the 
opiates, he swiftly goes to the wound, gently but firmly 
he probes it through all the pain. That is reasonable- 
ness; that is true pity, and that is Christ's way with 
sinful men. 



CHRIST'S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. 1 25 

Patience with men does not mean that we are to 
hide from them unpalatable truth; sympathy with 
them is not saying smooth things; and faith in their 
deep capacity is not a refusal to tell them their faults. 
But just here comes the most difficult of all things in 
Christ to copy: his faithfulness to the truth blended with 
his faithfulness of love. How tell a man his faults, and 
yet win him? How be reasonable, and yet sweet? 
St. Paul solves it in a phrase which describes Christ's 
way with sinful men, " speaking the truth in love ; " 

But in love of what? Of victory over error? So 
some read it. Nothing is oftener confounded than the 
love of victory and the love of truth. Men take the 
grand apostolic words, " Contend earnestly for the faith 
once delivered to the saints," and underscore the word 
"contend," and then put them for a motto over their 
newspaper, their pulpit, their creed, and baptize their 
itch for mastery with the sacred name of "love of 
truth," " loyalty to the faith." But there is a very sim- 
ple test to detect the sham : are you glad to find youi 
antagonist holding the substance of the very truth you 
are contending for, only in some other phrase, or do 
you refuse to recognize truth in any dress but your 
own party uniform. Such love of truth is only the love 
of having our own way, and is really one of the worst 
enemies of truth. I suppose the reason why half the 
arguments we have with men on politics, tariff, ques- 
tions of taste, reform, religion, what not, do not con- 
vince any one, is that we are arguing for victory, to 
overmatch the other man, and not for truth pure and 



126 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

simple. Is not that at the bottom of a great deal of 
the fruitlessness of the discussions of the day on re- 
ligious questions? Brilliant writers confute the other 
side, demolish opponents, with a heat of scorn that 
withers up all the bloom of the truth they advocate. It 
seems to me, more than half the power of a book like 
Butler's Analogy lies in the fact so open and sweet on 
every page that the writer cares nothing for victory, 
nothing to make a good point, will not evade a diffi- 
culty, nor take advantage of an opponent's slip — cares 
only for the truth; no, not even for the truth so much 
as for something beyond mere intellectual truth, to 
know the life of God, to have men know and feel the 
worth of the great living truths that have filled and sat- 
isfied his own soul. What a sweetness breathes through 
such dry words as these: " Things and actions are what 
they are, and the consequences of them will be what 
they will be: why, then, should we desire to be de- 
ceived?" Ah, it is a poor thing to tell a man his faults, 
to tower over him and get a confession of evil out of 
him ; but to win him to the truth he was made for, that 
is blessed. And that was what Christ's telling men of 
their faults meant. 

It meant more even than a love of truth. There is 
something beyond truth even. It is life, life in God 
and his life in men, which includes in itself truth, and 
adds to it the living use of truth. " Speaking the 
truth" in love to God and man: using it as gold, not 
with the miser's use to get and keep it for itself, but 
with the wise man's use for what it can get and be 



Christ's method of dealing with men. 127 

fashioned into, for righteousness, holiness, for the love 
and life of God in the soul. There is a way of telling 
men their faults in a cold allegiance to truth, duty, 
which is not sweet and only half reasonable. A min- 
ister does it sometimes : he goes to one of his people 
to tell him of a wrong course, a bad habit, because it 
is wrong the man should live so. He speaks the 
truth to him in the love of the truth. I am sure that 
is not the high Christian way. It is better so than 
not at all. But there is a more excellent way. It is 
to see the man's evil course, his fault as a cancer eating 
away' the soul, defacing the image of God in him, 
bringing blight and woe to him, making him a blot in 
the face of his Maker. Was it not so that Jesus said to 
the Samaritan woman, " He whom thou now hast is not 
thy husband ?" Not to triumph over her, not to win 
a soldier to virtue's side merely, not to vindicate the 
truth of purity even, but to wipe away a sister's stain 
and bring her back to his father and her father in 
purity. " I preached, yesterday, of hell and sinner's 
desert of it," said a young minister, on Monday, 
to McCheyne. " Did you tell them of it with 
tears ?" was the answer. Were there not tears in 
Christ's soul when he said to the woman, " He whom 
thou now hast is not thy husband." So have the 
great lovers of God and his truth ever opened the 
faults of men. " Of whom," says St. Paul, that ardent 
lover of the truth, that fearless rebuker of sinners, " of 
whom I tell you, even weeping, that they are the 
enemies of the Cross of Christ." What a power there 



128 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

is in such words, the power of truth, the revelation of 
sin's vileness and guilt, the faithful words of reason- 
ableness charging men with their faults, but mingled 
with it the sweetness of love that yearns for the lost 
to be saved, the vile to be cleansed. 

Let us sum it all up. What have we seen in Jesus 
talking with the Samaritan woman ? The picture once 
more of the sweetness and reasonableness of him who 
came to seek and to save the lost; his lofty faith in 
man's capacity to answer to the highest truth; his 
sympathy with lowly human ways and thoughts ; his 
patience as of the perfect with the imperfect, and above 
all the tender severity of his love which charges the 
sinner with his sin to save him from it. 

Is not that a wonderful picture which St. John has 
drawn of Christ by the well healing the misery of a 
poor sinner by his sweet truthfulness? 

Two lessons we draw from this study of Christ's 
way of dealing with men: lessons about the relation 
between him and men. 

I. That we are to study Christ as God's Revelation, 
not by himself, but as he is seen among men. That 
is only carrying out the great truth of the Incarnation. 
St. John says : " No man hath seen God at any time ; 
the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the 
Father, he hath declared him." It is God manifest in 
the flesh who shows us God. But no solitary man 
tells us what man is, we must see men as friends, sons, 
brothers, neighbors, to open the riches of human na- 
ture. And, so to know Jesus we must see him not 



CHRIST S METHOD OF DEALING WITH MEN. 1 29 

only on the mount praying, but by the roadside helping. 
This poor Samaritan, that lonely Zaccheus, the weep- 
ing; woman in Simon's house — these are the torches 
which throw light on the depths of Christ's character. 
You would see Jesus like Mary, you would sit at his 
feet and hear his word ; but you cannot see him per- 
fectly so. That is the one defect of that wonderful 
book, the "Imitation of Christ;" it pictures a Saviour 
followed and imitated in solitude, apart from men. 
But it is only as Christ is seen in contact with men 
that he reveals the deeper nature of God. You must 
see him among the poor, the sick, the heart-broken, 
the perplexed, the lost. And he is still going on his 
way among men, dealing with their hurts and mis- 
eries. What a freshness, brightness, and power ap- 
pear in him as we go with him to save men. A Sun- 
day-school teacher, patient with the poor imps and 
restless midgets from the alleys, a worker among the 
poor and diseased, a symyathetic soul open for per- 
plexed, tired men to come and drink in comfort — 
these see Jesus. 

2. We are to study man in the light of Christ's pres- 
ence. The disciples "marvelled that he talked with 
the woman." But they learned there something about 
women and Samaritans they never knew before. Our 
fellow-men are the most repulsive or the most attrac- 
tive of God's creation according as we visit them in 
Christ's company or without it. I do not wonder that 
so many strong natures become pessimists, cynics, 
misanthropes, skeptical of human good, who study 
9 



130 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

society out of the light of Christ's eye. There is no 
power of sympathy and pity in us that can resist the 
steady gravitation of human evil to draw us down either 
to despair of men, or else to despise them. Take such a 
pure and humane soul as George Eliot's : if ever any one 
had a natural feeling for human need and human worth 
it was she. But she saw men without any illuminating 
vision of Christ by them, and how steadily the vein of 
bitterness goes on increasing in her books ! The only 
help is to take Christ with us to men, and to read them 
continually in the light of hope which shines on them 
from his eye. Our prayer must be, " Lord, lift up our 
eyes to see the field thou seest white to the harvest ; 
draw us close to thy side to see men as thou seest, to 
love them as thou lovest, to be faithful to them as thou 
wert." There was an old theologian, I am sorry tc 
say he was a Lutheran, whose daily prayer used to be. 
" Replenish me, Lord, with the hatred of heretics." 
That is just the opposite of the spirit with which Jesus, 
as he sat on the well, talked with the heretical Samari- 
tan woman. Let us Lutherans of to-day pray in his 
own blessed temper, "Fill us, Lord, with the love of 
lost souls!" Then, as we see his eye bent on them 
with penetration and pity, we shall learn the worth of 
unworthy souls: then, as we mark the Divine image 
brought out by his creating breath, we shall see the 
glory of Jesus the Saviour of men! 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 1 3 

THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 



Philip. IV: 6, 7. "Be careful for nothing; but in everything by- 
prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made 
known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all under- 
standing, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." 

One of the most distinctive marks of the Bible is its 
power of enlarging human nature. It is like electricity, 
which draws out of substances new energies. The 
battery is applied to a dull metal, and up starts a bril- 
liant flame, a powerful gas. So the Bible comes to 
man, and he rises up a new being. Consider what 
the Old Testament did for the people of Israel, how 
under its touch a mob grew into a nation; and re- 
member what the New Testament did for the decay- 
ing empire of Rome, how it breathed on the cowardice, 
the baseness, the despair of that wretched time, and 
there sprang up the courage and purity, the piety and 
hope of the Christian church. So it has always been: 
count on your fingers the nations that to-day are lead- 
ing the van, thinking the new thoughts, giving the 
world its daily shove forward, and you have counted 
up the nations that have most deeply drunk in the 
spirit of the scriptures. 

The secret of this singular power of the Bible is in 
its daring treatment of human nature. It has been 
said that Christianity is a religion of weakness ; that 
it appeals only to the poorest part of man. On the 
contrary it is the religion of strength ; its treatment of 
man is heroic. It is not what is crushing and empty- 



132 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

ing in the scriptures that stirs the heart; it is not 
Christ saying, "You are lost; you are nothing; you 
must give up," who brings men to a new life; but 
Christ saying, "Arise! you are redeemed; behold the 
greatness of the life you may live!" The scriptures 
really discover man to himself: like Columbus, they 
sail away from that old world we know so well, of our 
sin and misery, of our weakness and despair, to the 
broad new world of our possibilities, our redeemed 
nature. What a strange realization of this there is in 
every true conversion! When I see the change 
wrought in men by the truth of God ; how a selfish, 
indolent, petty nature can suddenly rise up into a new 
hope, a great aim, a consecration and sweetness of 
which before it had nothing, it is like a star flashing 
out of the dark. If the Bible had taken the measure 
of us that we take of ourselves, and called men to do 
only what they could do easily, it would have failed. 
But God's call to a duty, a hope, is also a vision of a 
great possibility, and a promise that the vision shall 
become a reality. Whatever God commands us, 
brethren, we may be sure we can do. 

The text sets before us one of these Divine impossi- 
bilities. It is made up of a command and a promise: 
the command seems impossible, " Be careful for noth- 
ing;" and the promise seems impossible, "the peace 
of God shall keep your hearts and minds." 

I. How desperate seems the duty commanded: "Be 
careful for nothing." Only those who have never 
really grappled with the facts of life will think it easy. 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 1 33 

As soon as we begin to live in earnest, to have real 
interests, then carefulness comes. Care is the shadow 
that cleaves to the substance of life; and by yourself 
you can only get rid of the shadow by getting rid of 
the substance. Have no strong love for anybody; 
desire nothing; do nothing; hope for nothing with a 
manly vigor — and you will escape all carefulness. But 
a thin, careless, uninterested life -is not the fruit of the 
gospel. Christ does not make life unreal, but more 
solid, more real. It was so in the early Church : " Do 
you see a soldier more obedient, a mechanic more dili- 
gent, a mother more devoted ? Be sure," says one 
of the Fathers, "that one is a Christian." It is so 
now: to make a real Christian of a man is to increase 
his force every way ; it makes him more diligent, more 
enduring, a more real man at home, in the shop, at 
the polls, everywhere. Some, however, read the words, 
" Be careful for nothing," to mean care for nothing; 
and so they set to work to pare away the ordinary 
interests of life, shutting out the world, as they say. 
That used to be the old-fashioned way men escaped 
carefulness, by caring for nothing. And that was a 
kind of Christian stoicism. But our dangers to-day lie 
in quite another direction. We do not need to be con- 
vinced that the world must be used, that we must live 
in it, and live strongly in our use of it ; there is no dan- 
ger of any of us becoming ascetics. I only wish there 
were more danger of it. But the problem for us is how 
to take strong hold of life here, and not let it take hold 
of us — how to use the world to the full and not abuse it. 



134 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

The text, brethren, tells us how to do that. It sets 
us the impossible task, and then reveals the power by 
which to achieve the impossibility. 

The secret of getting rid of carefulness is to have all 
our interest in life resting on God. True; every real 
interest of life does at last rest there, whatever we may 
think about it. We often forget that: we look at men 
absorbed in business, in science, in art, in social life, 
and it seems to us as though their interests were wholly 
cut off from God. We think of them, we speak of them 
as men "without God in the world"; and so in one 
sense they are; but after all the real solid interest of 
their occupation has its support in God. It is his truth 
they study, his laws they are working, the relation to 
their fellow which he has established that furnishes 
their joy. The interest of life, for all of us, in the 
deepest sense, does rest on God. Do what we will, we 
cannot get away from that broad basis of life. But oh, 
the difference between having that basis, and con- 
sciously resting on it: it is the difference between the 
childlike freedom from all carefulness of the Christian, 
and the anxious attempt of the unbeliever to be his 
own providence. The secret of a quiet heart, then, is 
to feel that foundation all the time solid beneath us and 
our load. And this is the great thing the Bible does 
for us — it gives us a real living grasp of this knowledge 
of God, our Helper, our life, the soul of our being: 
" This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only 
true God." 

See, first of all, how it puts into us a positive force 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 1 35 

with which to keep carefulness off at arm's length. 
Part of the secret of the power of the Bible is that it 
does not treat our sins and miseries with negatives. It 
does not merely say, " Thou shalt not" ; but brings a 
positive life; it adds something; it says, "This is the 
way, walk ye in it." It never calls us to fight a sin, 
but it puts into our hands a sword to fight with ; it 
never tells us to give up anything but it has a better to 
put in its place. 

And so its cure for the misery of carefulness is to 
find for us a new strength to put under our burden. 
Call to mind for a moment how worldly friends advise 
you in times of anxiety: they come and hear your 
trouble, and then they sympathize, and that is something; 
even a blind, silent sympathy is some relief, so great is 
the power of love ; but as for light, for wisdom, for ef- 
fectual help they say, "Do not worry; you must not 
think about your troubles ; you must not look forward." 
There they stop ; they can only say " don't" ; but God 
comes and says " do." Hear what Christ says to the 
anxious crowd, "take no anxious thought"; that is 
merely negative;, it shows what we must not do; and 
then he goes on to give them a positive thought, a 
vision, a pledge that crowds out the anxious care, 
" Your Father knoweth that ye have need!' He sees the 
despondency of the disciples, and he says, " Let not 
your heart be troubled"; but to that he adds at once a 
positive support, "Ye believe in God; believe also in 
me." And now the message the Apostle brings in the 
text is in the same line; " Be careful for nothinsr" ; that 



I36 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

is only a negative; that only shuts the gate on the way 
we are not to go; but right by he opens another gate, 
into the way we are to go, " in everything by prayer 
let your requests be made known to God." God does 
not say merely " don't worry," but he says, " Come to 
me; tell me your need; rest on my strength." 

So, my brother, in your anxiety about your children, 
your health, your business, when you feel yourself 
eaten up with troubled thoughts, and you are ashamed 
of it and wish you could get free, you are not to try 
to cast out these thoughts by main force. What is the 
use of saying to yourself, " I ought not to worry : I 
must not; I will not." No, you must take hold of 
something positive; you must grasp God's provided 
strength and expel carefulness by the sense of God's 
.care for you : let it sweep over your soul as the evening 
breeze blows over the heated city. And this is the 
positive force with which you are to meet this positive 
evil of carefulness — " in everything let your requests 
be made known unto God." But this, you say, is only 
telling you to pray, and you do not feel sure that God 
will always give you just what you pray for. No, I 
hope we never shall have that kind of assurance, the 
remedy for carefulness is not an' unlimited permission 
to draw on God for just what we fancy we want. 
What a superstitious idea of prayer that is, that every 
man is to get just what he asks for! What egotists, 
what stagnant creatures, such a power would make us. 
The savage in the South Seas' suns himself in perpetual 
summer and plucks his bread ready made from the 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 1 37 

branch above him, and there he stagnates: and a 
spiritual kingdom where prayer was only a hand put 
up to pull the wished fruit off the ever-ready tree 
would make us in the kingdom of God what the South 
Sea islander is in the kingdom of this world, a do- 
nothing, a cipher. Prayer is not a charm to bring 
God to our side to do just what we want, as the 
slave of the lamp in the story, but it is the gate that 
brings us to God. 

In the text we see how the apostle includes in his 
remedy all that men commonly think is the help they 
can get by prayer, and a great deal more. He does 
not say, " pray for what you want and you shall have 
it ;" but he shows how coming to God is asking and 
seeing and finding and being taken up into the great 
peace and blessedness of God himself. It is as if a sick 
man, hearing of a great physician who had a certain 
famous medicine, should come and ask him for it, and 
the physician should look at him and say, " Come with 
me and I will cure you," and the man should make re- 
ply, " But will you not give me 'the medicine?" and 
the physician answers, " Yes, if the medicine is needed, 
that you shall have too, but you need more than that," 
and then should take him with him to the high hiHs, 
where he lived, and so set him in the right track and 
give him the benefit of his skill and cheering presence 
till he was strong again. Now men go to God to get 
a particular medicine : " Give me trade," says the 
harassed merchant ;" " Give me health," cries the in- 
valid;" "Give me back my child," prays the anxious 



I38 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

mother; and they want nothing else — nothing else will 
do. But God is the soul's physician, the healer who 
has life in himself to give to all. And so the apostle 
sends us to him. " Let your requests be made known 
unto God!* How broad that is: " by prayer" i. e., by 
committing our whole case to God, by casting the 
burden of life down at his feet ; " by supplication" i. e., 
by asking for the particular thing you think you need : 
that is not excluded. Go and ask; it may be the 
medicine you think will heal is the one God sees is 
good, and he is only waiting for you as a child to ask. 
God can, and often does in his good wisdom, give the 
particular thing we ask. Let us believe that with all 
our heart, while we still cling to the higher view of 
prayer, its spiritual answer. How many have gone to 
God with their one request, and got it! "The prayer 
of faith shall save the sick;" Elijah prayed for rain, 
and the rain came. It is good even to agonize for the 
desired blessing, yes although, at last it be withheld, 
even as Christ prayed till the bloody sweat ran down, 
as St. Paul prayed again and again that the thorn 
should go. 

Just at this point, by a single word, the Apostle 
suggests the entirely unexpected way in which our 
load loses its heaviness as we are bringing it to God. 
" In everything let your requests be made known unto 
God with thanksgiving." " With thanksgiving :" how 
strangely that sounds here ! It changes the key from 
complaint to praise. How impossible that seems. 
But that is really St. Paul's own history. " There was 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 1 39 

given me a thorn," he says, " and I besought the Lord 
thrice that it might depart, and he said to me, My 
grace is sufficient for thee. Most gladly, therefore, 
will I rather glory in my infirmities. I take pleasure 
in them." 

What a great truth there is here : the truth that 
God, in discovering himself to us, discovers to us 
our real selves ; that as we touch him a new continent 
rises on the soul's horizon, and we are led out into a 
new, great experience. We go to him with a load, 
but as we go we come into a strange, fresh strength. 
In his presence something strikes through our pain 
that makes us half forget it is pain. It is as if a child 
should miss a plaything and run to its mother in 
another room to beg her to find it, and when it came 
where she was, should catch a glimpse through the 
open door of the garden full of flowers and birds and 
sunshine, and at that sight lose all care for its toy. 
You can not really come to God and not find how 
much deeper your life is than in your narrow care- 
fulness you had felt it. This ought to blend with 
our prayer when we are very anxious. You go and 
cry to him of the one thing that troubles you ; you 
have only a monotonous wail; but how can you 
really see God, and be conscious of nothing but your 
own little worry? Do you not see him? Lifted up 
here by his side, do you not see the great horizon of 
life ? You are in the shadow, but can you not see the 
sunshine lying wide and far beyond ? Is there not in 
your heart even now a great peaceful depth lying be- 



140 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

low this flurry of pain, as under the storm on the sea 
lie the deep, unmoved abysses ? Surely a Christian 
must feel that when he is before God ! Or if he does 
not have it now, yet that is his possibility; he may 
have it; it is what he should set before him as his arm. 
Let us think for a moment how that experience 
grows. A man comes in the pain and darkness of his 
trouble and begins to pray. At first it is all only a 
dim groping in the midst of suffering, a trying to find 
the hand that holds the balm. But in the groping 
there comes a sense of all that God has done, of his 
patience and pity : it is like the faint coming of dawn, 
and then we falter out our thanks; with our com- 
plaints we mingle praise ; and so with that thought of 
his goodness comes the vision of himself. He stands 
over us, and we are conscious of the great reality of 
God, and that of itself is balm to our hurt: the sense 
of it comes down like the soft light of the stars in the 
dark night. We seem to hear from the throne, " Be 
still and know that I am God." Oh, my brother, if 
you have gone to God with your cry, and have come 
away only with the thought that you have or have 
not got your little petition, it seems to me you must 
have missed the real meaning of prayer. As if a man 
should have met General Washington, and only remem- 
ber that he gave him a dinner which was or was not, as 
the case may be, very good. How you would wonder 
at such a man ! Well, you ought to wonder at your- 
self, that you go to God and come back, and see 
nothing but the gift he puts into your hand. 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 141 

I have tried to bring out the Apostle's cure for over- 
carefulness; that it is really resting our burden of life 
on the broad base of God's fatherly care for us. That 
is what is meant by "making known our requests;" 
it is falling back on God; it is losing our littleness in 
the sense of his greatness. You remember how Eli- 
sha's servant was crushed with the terror of the hostile 
army that suddenly surrounded their quiet home in 
Dothan, and how at the prophet's prayer the servant's 
eyes were opened, and he saw, and " behold the moun- 
tain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about 
Elis'ha." That was the end of all his anxiety. Now, 
that is the Apostle's message struck into actual life ; 
the highest gift of prayer is not to bring us God's 
strength and help, these are always encamped about 
us, but to open our eyes to the heavenly vision, to 
throw wide our souls that the Divine peace may enter. 

This brings us to consider another thought of the 
text, the promise of God's peace. And what a great 
promise that is ! " Bring your anxiety," says the Apos- 
tle, " to God, with thanks for his cr'oodness and entreat- 
ies for his deliverance ; cast your carefulness on him, 
and then the peace of God shall possess you." The 
word we have in our translation, "keep," has a figure 
in it; it means to stand sentinel, to keep guard over. 
Life pictures itself to the Apostle's mind as a camp; 
without the foe, within is the mixed host of a great 
army, good and bad, loyal and mutineers ; what a con- 
dition of insecurity, of alarms, of sudden changes ! But 
round the camp march, the vigilant sentries; through 



142 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the streets paces the patrol ; the peace of God shall be 
our sentinel; God is on picket over the wild host: he 
"shall keep your hearts and minds." It seems almo-st 
impossible there should be such a power in our lives. 
It is only a dream, a beautiful vision seen by the Apos- 
tle in some high-wrought hour; or, it is for a great 
saint, a Paul, an Isaiah, or the Mary that sat at Jesus' 
feet. It cannot be for me, a common man, tossed in 
life's battle, soiled and troubled. That is what we say; 
and that is the first thin edge of a very old heresy, the 
heresy that there are castes and inner circles, a spiritual 
aristocracy in Christ's kingdom, that some truths, and 
graces and promises are for a chosen few. It begins 
in a disbelief that such truths as those of the text can 
be meant for ordinary men. It crops out in the ap- 
parent flattery, but real self-excuse of the layman to 
the minister: "Yes, you may live purely, and have 
such peace, for you are sheltered ; but I in my work, 
never." It sounds from men in every calling, as when 
the merchant says : " One cannot do business and not 
worry." All this skepticism of the possibility of hav- 
ing a deep peace in ordinary life, grows out of our 
blindness to the strength there is in God. What makes 
it possible to have a great many things to care for and 
yet not be anxious about anything? Why, it is the 
sense of God's presence with us, the vision of life in 
him, the touch of his hand on us felt quieting the 
throbbing of the heart. And that is the very remedy 
the Apostle offers, " in everything by prayer and sup- 
plication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made 



THE CURE OF CAREFULNESS. 1 43 

known unto God." Is this fanciful? Is it an extrav- 
agant idea of prayer which common men cannot take 
in? No, it is only the idea of our venerable catechism, 
the idea contained in the answer you gave as a child, 
when to the minister's question, What is prayer? You 
replied : " Prayer is conversation with God;" a conver- 
sation, a communion, an interchange of thought and 
wish and emotion. Think of it ! — to come in contact 
with God, to see him, to hear his whisper in the soul, 
to be conscious of his presence, to be possessed by him. 
What may not that do for me ? And then I read of 
what it has done; of Moses casting the burden of that 
great people on God ; of the timid Jacob wrestling 
with God and prevailing as a prince ; of Paul groaning 
under his thorn, and then rising from prayer to rejoice 
in his pains ; and so down the long line of the troubled 
that have in prayer found the peace that could keep 
them, even down to my own experience, and how can 
I be unbelieving? If a man can really come to God 
and tell him his requests, really pray, then the peace 
of God shall keep him; it shall stand sentinel over the 
camp of his heart, and hold back every skulking foe, 
quiet every brawling passion. 

We may understand, I 'think, from what the sym- 
pathy of men in our anxieties does for us, what God 
can do. 

You go to some fellow-man with your cares, and you 
make known your anxieties : you know he can not re- 
lieve you; you do not believe he can tell you of any 
help; but you unfold your story. And he listens; he 



144 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

says a few words that really tell you nothing : he feels 
himself how helpless he is. But somehow or other 
you go away lightened ; you have lost something of 
your heavy load simply by the telling. And it is not 
a mere fancied relief. You have unconsciously got 
hold of one of the great pillars of life : by opening youi 
heart to a true fellow-man, you have got a real though 
imperfect support. In some dim way you realize that 
you are not alone: you are made aware that men are 
a brotherhood, and that the care and burden of one is 
the care also of all ; and by your contact with this 
man and his sympathy, the strength of the human 
brotherhood has slipped into your soul. You have 
got a real strength, one that he is not conscious of 
having given, but that he has given none the less. 
And he is vaguely conscious of a weight that has 
come on his shoulders from your contact and his own 
sympathy: and it is true; the weight of thought, of 
foreboding, of feverish fret has been distributed. But 
the brotherhood of men is only a corollary, a conse- 
quent truth from the deeper relation of our sonship to 
God. Men are our brothers only because God is our 
common father. And what the brothers do for us by 
sharing our burde \ that- in an infinitely greater way 
God does for us, not by sharing the load, but by 
wholly taking us up into his strength. 

You get some relief by going to men — a brief, tem- 
porary relief. What that ought to teach you is to go 
up higher; to leave the image and come at the actual; 
to leave the partial and grasp the complete. You 



THE CURE OP CAREFULNESS. 1 45 

say, " Oh, I have sought for human help and sym- 
pathy, and it only goes a little way." Yes, it does go 
only a little way, a very little way; and therefore you 
ought to make known your requests to God, who has 
given your fellowman the ability to bear even a frag- 
ment of your burden. Now turn to him. If a man 
had known only the light of the moon, and com- 
plained that it was too feeble, and then learned that 
this feeble light was the reflection of a greater, would 
he not seek the sun? 

Believe me, when the Apostle rises from his nega- 
tive of "be careful for nothing," to the direction, "let 
your requests be made known to God," he is really 
leading you to the gate which, once opened, lets in a 
new flood of life upon our being. Behind that lonely, 
seeking, unburdening hour of prayer stands the great 
angel of God's peace, with the soft cool hands that 
laid on the aching brow make it cease from throb- 
bing, that touch the tired eyes and they see into the 
far, glorious vistas of the eternal, that unbar the soul 
and let in the presence of God himself. That is the 
real meaning of prayer: it is the magnetic chord that 
touches God's heart at one end and ours at the other, 
and sends down his life through us ; it is the blank 
door, on this side of which is the darkness and the 
dumbness of life all to ourselves, but pushed open lets 
in the glory and voiceful fullness of a Divine presence. 

Do not think, then, so much of God's gifts as of 
himself: not so much of what he may do for you as of 
what he is. I believe the surprised experience of thou- 



I46 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

sands of souls is that they go to get something of God, 
and in the blessedness of being drawn to the Giver's 
breast, forget what they came for — as Saul went to search 
for his father's asses, and finding the great prophet with 
the kingdom that he promised, went back indifferent to 
what he sought. That is really a sweeping up — not to 
get one's desires, but to rise above them. 

I would have you, then, come into the secret of the 
Lord, and be kept " secretly in a pavilion from the strife 
of tongues." What I could wish for you, my anxious 
brother, is not that your burden may all pass, or that 
God should certainly give you the one thing you are 
crying for, but something much larger and deeper, an 
eternal gift — that you may find him, that you may be 
able to see him and know his presence there, to tell all 
your need with prayer and thanksgiving; in one word, 
that you may really pray. And then his peace shall 
keep you : " the peace of God which passeth all under- 
standing shall stand sentinel over your heart, and every 
foe shall flee away!" 



ETERNAL LIFE. 



John xiv. 19. — "Because I live, ye shall live also." 

No word that Christ uses about himself is so in- 
spiring and satisfying as this word " Life." It ex- 
presses the greatness, the fulness, the sufficiency there 
is in him for men. Whenever he speaks it, or it is 



ETERNAL LIFE. 1 47 

spoken of him, there comes with it a sense of expan- 
sion, as though our horizon widened and the clouds 
lifted from our path. At the very sound of it we seem 
to feel the current of our being grow deeper and 
stronger. 

See how it is he uses it, as he comes to one and an- 
other drooping spirit. With this word he dispels the 
despondency of Thomas when he puts that melancholy 
question of doubt: " How can we know the way?" " I " 
answers Jesus, "am the way, the truth. I am the life." 
It is with this that he cheers the despair of Martha at 
the tomb of Lazarus: " I am the resurrection and the 
life." And when he comes to the Apostle in exile in 
Patmos to show him things that must be, and give him 
the last message to the churches, it is with this word 
that he raises his mind to the height of the great vision 
to be unfolded : " I am he that liveth, and was dead ; 
and behold, I am alive forevermore." 

The text, then, gives us a great thought; the thought 
of essential life. That thought, apart from what that 
life may be to me, or may do for me, is full of inspira- 
tion and strength. For we must remember who it is 
that says this. It is he who in the beginning of John's 
gospel is set before us in that majestic vision of things 
Divine, as the word that was with God, and that was 
God ; it is the Eternal Creator by whom all things 
were made, and without whom was not any thing 
made that was made, " In him," pursues the record, 
in him was life." Here then is the absolute life; life 
that depends on none but itself; a being unwasting, 



I48 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

unchanging, ever full, ever glorious, ever overflowing. 
Let us say, for the moment, that it does nothing for 
me, that I can only gaze on it as a far-off star, whose 
glory and strength must always be outside of my his- 
tory. And yet the influence of that vision does bring 
help. The very thought of such fulness and perma- 
nence of life is to the soul like the buttress to the wall, 
it fortifies it ; it braces it up, and gives it solidity. 

For this world of ours seems so unstable. It is all 
shifting and changing. At first, when we are young, 
we are struck with the permanence of things. To the 
boy the years are endless in length : he can hardly see 
from one end to the other. And everything seems to 
continue unaltered. It is a fixed world to him with 
only a few sluggish currents of movement that only 
make the general permanence of things the more con- 
spicuous. But presently, as he grows older, the fixed 
mass begins to move. The old frame of things is 
changing; old faces are going and new ones com- 
ing. It is not, as he once thought, a solid mass; it is 
fluid. It moves faster and faster. And before he has 
come to middle age, life has come to seem a quick- 
sand in which all things are being swallowed up. And 
that experience brings with it a depressing influence. 
We naturally seek for some central point which re- 
mains; we long for some foundation on which our 
thought of life may rest. But where shall we find it? 
We change : our bodies, they are not what they were a 
few years ago. A man in mid-life takes up a picture 
of himself as a lad : he can hardly find a feature there 



ETERNAL LIFE. 1 49 

that is his now. All that is gone forever. And he 
feels that what he is now, in a few years more, will 
have gone in the same way. He feels as though his 
solid flesh and blood were fluid ; they are shifting and 
changing as the water in the stream. And our thoughts 
and tastes are changing, too. We have not the same 
minds we had ten years ago. You put away a book 
on your shelf that greatly pleases you; you want to 
keep it, for it speaks your deepest, truest thought to 
you ; and then after a few years you take it down, and 
as you turn over the pages you wonder where the light 
and power you once felt in them have gone. Well, you 
have got another mind; you have traveled past that; 
and you put back your author on the shelf sadly feel- 
ing that one strain of thought has been swallowed up. 
And our affections — they are going, too. You meet an 
old friend that once answered to you sympathy for 
sympathy, regard for regard ; but as you talk you miss 
something: the fire has gone out — only ashes are there. 
You and he accord no more; and when you part it 
is as though you were coming away from the grave 
of an old friendship. It has gone. What tragedies 
these changing affections make ! Many and many a 
brother grows away from his brother; many and 
many a husband and wife, who live together in peace, 
have buried the early love. Each has changed. 

And if we turn away from ourselves to look out on 
things that are fixed — society, trade, politics — it is 
another world than that we knew when we were young. 
How often a man feels as though he were a stranger 



150 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

in a world that he has been living in all the time. The 
old merchant says, " I cannot do business in these days : 
everything has been so altered." The old politician 
can not accommodate himself to the new ideas of 
statesmanship; the new watch-words are all strange and 
awkward to him. The old preacher finds his sermons 
out of fashion. And they all feel as though the world 
had left them before they were dead. The very lessons 
of history grow useless: we turn to the old story of 
the struggles and problems of men in the ancient world; 
but we find they do not fit into the struggles and prob- 
lems of to-day; new situations and needs have sprung 
up that the old experience does not meet. But surely 
something is fixed: the solid frame- work of the earth, 
seas, and mountains, and rivers, and valleys? And then 
Science unrolls her map and shows how rivers have left 
their beds, and valleys disappeared — how the mountains 
are wearing down, and the seas forsaking their shores — 
and then, far on, in the future she puts her finger on the 
spot when this old familiar earth shall have disappeared, 
swallowed up in the shifting of the Universe. It seems 
all a bitter mockery, the coming and fading of a dream. 
And then, to our perplexity and sense of mockery 
comes the word of Christ, "I live." Men do come 
and go; but Christ abides. Nations rise and fall, but 
the life of nations is the same. Worlds are framed 
and decay; but he that gave them being and form is 
ever young. " I am the life : Jesus Christ, the same 
yesterday, and to-day, and forever!' That, I say, is a 
great thought : it brings strength and solidity to life. 



ETERNAL LIFE. 151 

" It fortifies my soul to know 
That tho' I perish, truth is so; 
That howsoe'er I change and range, 
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change. 
I steadier step when I recall 
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall." 

But the text does more than show us the abiding 
life : it gives us a share in it. " Because I live, ye shall 
live also." What a fragmentary thing our existence 
seems to us at times. It comes; it brightens; it holds 
its place for a time ; and then it fails ; it fades ; it is 
gone. What is your life? "It is even a vapor that 
appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." 
I am sure that picture of life drawn by the apostle has 
struck us in some hours with its truth ; it has seemed 
the only truth about it. And it has seemed such a sad 
thing: this life that we have so carefully cherished, 
that we have spent such pains to cultivate, that we 
have been building up so laboriously — it is after all 
only a bubble, glowing with bright changing colors, 
but presently to burst and vanish. And then, with 
the sadness has come the reckless mood ; why take 
such pains with what after all must presently dis- 
appear? Why toil to achieve, to subdue self? Why 
not enjoy what we can, and make the most of our 
short day ? 

And then comes the vision Christ unfolds in the 
text — the vision of the great unending existence. 
Your life here, he says, is a vapor ; but you are not a 
vapor. Soon all this scene in which you are moving 



152 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

will vanish, but you shall not vanish with it: you 
shall live — " Because I live, ye shall live also." And 
with his great word comes the assurance of our per- 
manence in the midst of all this that is so imperma- 
nent. We see our life lifted aloft like frail fragments 
which the artist has set in the enduring mosaic ; there 
on the great cathedral wall the bit of glass caught up 
from the rubbish was s x et ages ago, and there it looks 
down on the fleeting generations, on kingdoms falling 
and cities decaying, itself unchanged. And so as we 
hear Jesus repeating his solemn, eternal promise, we 
see our little flash of being caught up and set in its 
niche in his own unfailing existence : " Because I live, 
ye shall live also." 

Now, if we look carefully at this we will see, I think, 
that two great truths about life are affirmed here. 

I. Christ declares our conscious existence is to go 
on because his goes on. That is, it is to go on beyond 
death. The text is a part of Christ's declaration to the 
disciples of what will befall them after his own decease. 
"I go to prepare a place for you," he says: "I will 
come again and receive you unto myself." It is of his 
departure that he is talking, and he would show them 
how that departure is really no destruction of life, but 
only another stage in it. He is to die and go out of 
their sight, but not out of existence; not even away 
from them. "I will not leave you comfortless: I will 
come to you." He saw before him the cross, the tomb, 
and the resurrection. He looked through the shadow of 
death that fell across his path, and saw how it was only 



ETERNAL LIFE. 153 

a shadow, beyond which he should presently emerge 
into the light again. And then he declared that just 
as he passed through the shadow and came out beyond, 
so should they. Of course, they did not understand 
his words then. Nothing but experience could inter- 
pret them. But when the experience came, and they 
had seen him die, and then after their short despair 
welcomed him from the tomb again, would they not 
remember his words and feel that they had in them a 
guarantee of endless life? So St. Paul understood it 
and used it. When some at Corinth had doubts about 
the life beyond the grave, he wrote urging the very 
truth of the text, that Christ's life it is that guarantees 
ours: " How," he asks, "if Christ be preached that he 
rose from the dead — how say some of you that there 
is no resurrection of the dead ? But, now, Christ is 
risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them 
that slept." Did he go into the darkness and come 
up again ? Then, so shall we. He is the first to break 
those heavy fetters of death ; but after him follow an 
innumerable company. 

And that is the answer to the deep question of Job : 
"If a man die, shall he live again? " What a question 
it is ! Men are saying now, many of them, that it is a 
foolish question, and has nothing to do with the real 
business and worth of life; that whether we live again 
or not makes no difference about the importance and 
Tightness of duty here and now. I do not think 
so : it seems to me that the answer to that question 
will have a very marked effect on our view of what is 



154 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

duty, and what the great ends of life are; it is there- 
fore a deeply important question even from a practical 
point of view. But at any rate, foolish or wise, men 
will go on asking it. Over two thousand years ago 
Socrates sat pondering it, and turning it over to get 
light on it ; and by him, listening eagerly to his discus- 
sion, sat the most serious minds of his day. Within a 
few hours of death it seemed to him one of the worthi- 
est occupations for the end of life to ask once more : 
" If a man die, shall he live again?" And men have 
been asking it ever since. Have we not all felt the 
point of that question at one time or other going home 
to the soul, as if it had never occurred before? At the 
grave when we were taking our last look at the coffin 
as the mould fell and hid it away, has it not come — 
" Shall he live again ? " Or, when suddenly from the 
busy scene of life some one that has been busiest has 
gone, and we look up to see the face vanishing, to 
hear ^he aoor closing, and then as we feel the empty 
place, we have asked, " Is he still conscious ; is he 
busy?" Then the question : "Shall he live again?" 
does not seem vain. 

Jesus answers that question : " Because I live, ye 
shall live also." 

" But suppose," says one, " I cannot believe that 
Christ does live ; how will this saying of his help me?" 
It will not help you. The question of our life Christ 
has bound up with his own so closely that while if we 
really believe on him we have everlasting life, the glo- 
rious vision and the thrilling sense of it. Yet if we 



ETERNAL LIFE. 155 

throw away his life, we with the same act reject our 
own. It is the very thing the Apostle says : " If Christ 
be not risen, your faith is vain." And so if we cannot 
believe him there is nothing left for us but blank dark- 
ness. Men think sometimes they have very good 
arguments for life beyond the grave, apart from what 
Christ was and said. But it is all a delusion. Let 
them once but fairly give him up, and as he passes out 
of their sight the world beyond will fade out of sight 
too. He it is that " hath brought life and immortality 
to light :" he holds the light at the door of the tomb, 
and it shines through so that we see the life beyond. 
But if you thrust him into the tomb and shut the door 
on him, the light goes with him. All this is only say- 
ing what Peter said to the rulers and elders : " There 
is none other name under heaven whereby we must be 
saved." No Christ, no eternal life. 

But is it possible, looking at that bright, radiant, 
vital figure, to help believing, however it may be with 
the countless generations of men, the shadowy proces- 
sion that files ghost-like through the centuries, that 
Christ lives ? "I live," he cries, and his penetrating 
voice comes ringing across the ages, those dim 1800 
years, as though it were but yesterday. We open the 
Gospels, and as we read, out of the pale pages comes a 
form, a presence, a person, a thrilling life : we see him 
the strange child in the temple, we watch him meekly 
following his parents down to Nazareth ; we see the 
baptism, the descending Dove ; we go with him about 
Galilee, listening to his stirring words, seeing his 



I56 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

works, feeling his sweetness and holy beauty, wonder- 
ing and lost at the marvellous vision. He is before us 
the perfect one, the spotless, the mysteriously holy, 
and yet no far-off angel, but the tender, smiling, weep- 
ing, suffering man. "Which of you," he says, " con- 
vinceth me of sin?" What a challenge for a human 
being to make to his enemies ! And yet it has never 
been taken up. In the midst of that foul, dark age, he 
walks a stainless form, like some white angel of God 
treading the vile ways of hell — and yet no angel, but a 
sensitive, tender-hearted man. Whence, we ask, can 
such a being come ? And he gives the answer, " I 
came down from heaven." And then the hearts of men 
acknowledged that claim. " We know," said the reluct- 
ant Pharisee, " we know that thou art a teacher come 
from God." "We believe," cried the warm-hearted 
disciple, " and are sure that thou art the Christ the son 
of the living God." How they clung to him! " Let us 
also go," said Thomas, "that we may die with him." 
" He goes," thinks the despondent disciple, " to almost 
certain death ; but if he dies what is there worth living 
for ? He will die ; then let us die with him." 

And he did die : contrary to every thought of all 
that clung to him, the grave closed over him. In the 
bewilderment that seized the disciples when they saw 
that he was really dead, we can read the conviction 
Christ had wrought in the minds of all that loved him, 
that death was something alien to him. It had never 
occurred to his disciples that he could die : he was the 
supreme life. Those three days were days of darkness 



ETERNAL LIFE. I 57 

that could be felt. It was not merely that they had 
lost a friend, a leader; it was life itself that was buried 
in Joseph's tomb: if Christ could die, then death must 
seize everything ; it had seized everything. From that 
tomb there rose a mist that enveloped the green earth, 
the blue sky, the fair faces of men, the bright sunshine, 
with a pall of despair. They and the race of men were 
all doomed, waiting a little moment till the eternal tomb 
should open for them. And then when he rose, when 
they saw him, touched his hands, heard his voice, then 
life leaped up again, never to leave them ! The grave 
that had been swallowing everything had proved un- 
able to hold him : he lived. They had not been wrong 
in thinking him one that could not perish : he lived, 
and at his touch the spell of death, that had lain so long 
on the hearts of men that it had congealed them into 
despair of life, was broken forever. He might go away 
into the heavens now ; they might watch him vanish- 
ing into the clouds, and the awful silence and empti- 
ness of that absence might fall upon them, but it could 
not touch any more their sense that he lived. Life 
was with them forever. "Because he lived, they 
should live also!' 

" Well," you say, " it might be so for them : they 
had seen him; they had known him before death ; and 
they had seen him after death. That will do for them ; 
but it will not do for us : we have not seen him." But 
if we have not the sight of him, we have what they 
could not have, the sense of that same vital presence 
coming down undiminished through eighteen centu- 



158 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

ries of the world's history. If in the gospel there 
shines out a personality, a living force so strong, so 
pure, so vivid, that the simplest account of it is that 
it was God manifest in the flesh ; then in the history 
of Christ's influence for all these ages we have a con- 
tinuance, a persistence of the force of that personality, 
that is nothing less than life itself going on across 
centuries, over oceans, through races. It is idle to 
talk of the influence of great ideas, as if the power of 
Christ to-day were in his teaching, his morality ; or 
of his system, as if the Christian world were moved 
by the force of his logic ; for what makes Jesus Christ 
a force in the world now is the sway he has over 
hearts. In every age Christianity has been the power 
that swayed the world because of souls that echoed 
Peter's cry, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast 
the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure 
that thou art the Christ, the son of the living God." As 
each generation came, it found itself confronted by a life, 
a presence, a person that claimed love and service : some 
refused, disdained; some resisted, struggled against the 
influence ; but always a certain portion yielded, obeyed, 
loved, and found in that love and obedience an inspira- 
tion and joy and freedom that was like the wine of a new 
being taking possession of them. These souls it is that 
have made Christianity powerful. To them Christ lived ; 
lived as truly as he did to Peter and John and James 
and Mary on the shores of the Galilean lake and in the 
home of Bethany; yes, more truly, for it was when 
Christ was known no more after the flesh but in the 



ETERNAL LIFE. I 59 

spirit, that he became most real : his life was more real 
to St. Paul, more intimate and vital, more the very 
breath of his soul, than even to Peter or John when they 
walked up and down Judea with him. To these mil- 
lions, then, in every age, Christ has lived: thousands 
have died for him, not for his sermon on the mount, 
nor for his doctrine of God's fatherhood, nor for his 
atonement, no, but for him. Myriads have given up 
home and friends and all that makes life sweet for him; 
millions have for his sake and under the breath of his 
loving suasion broken away from vice, from selfishness, 
from pride, and tamed their hearts to his hand. And 
these have always been the living spirit of each age of 
the church. For one Peter or John or Mary that be- 
lieved and loved him then, there have been thousands 
and millions in the ages after; and instead of that per- 
sonal presence growing less after spanning 1800 years 
of history, there are more that believe him as thor- 
oughly as Peter did, and that love him as deeply as 
did John, now than ever. It is a strange credulity that 
admits that Jesus lived to Peter and Mary and John, 
was alive to them long after they saw him buried, and 
does not admit that he was alive to St. Paul, or to Au- 
gustine, or to Luther, or to you and me. 

Does Christ live to my soul ? When he says, " I 
live," does my heart answer, "Yes, Lord, I know it: 
thou art more real to me than father or mother, than 
the solid earth; yea, than my own being" — does the 
truest life of faith and love and loyalty in me throb 
responsive to his word? Well, there, then, is the 



l6o SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

ground of my hope for what is beyond the grave. 
" Because I live, thou shalt live also." I know that 
he lives; I can as soon doubt of my own existence. 
You may reason me out of it; but it is like reasoning 
a man out of a belief in the external world: prove to 
him that he knows nothing outside of his own sensa- 
tion, and yet he will slip back into the old confidence 
of the outer world, and go on as if there had been no 
argument at all. And so prove to me that my confi- 
dent assurance that Christ sees me, loves me, hears me, 
answers me, is only a fancy of my mind; and when you 
are done, though I have no arguments, the conviction 
of that life, and my life in him, rolls its tide over all 
reasons, and he lives to me. And if he lives, then his 
word comes to me again, therefore, u ye shall live also." 
I don't know why this irresistible conviction of Christ's 
life above me, about me, in me, is not as reasonable as 
our irresistible conviction of the reality of the external 
world. Neither of them can be proved, and yet wc 
cannot help believing both when we have experienced 
them. To a Christian, Christ's life is as real as the 
world about him; at last it becomes more real; for 
when the sky and hills, and the faces of dear friends, 
are all swimming and reeling into mist, dissolving and 
vanishing in the valley of death, then to millions that 
face and voice have grown clearer and more real, that 
presence has been the only stable thing. 

This then is our only guarantee of the life beyond: 
and it is enough. If we have once leaned our weight on 
it in some hour of anguish, we have been satisfied that 



ETERNAL LIFE. IOl 

it is enough. When Schliermacher stood by the grave 
of his only son, and tried the various philosophical 
arguments he had been constructing in his hours 
of study for the immortality of the soul, every one 
snapped in his grasp, but this. In the fire of that try- 
ing hour every reason was consumed but Christ's own 
word. He heard Christ say : " I live," and then through 
the darkness he saw that in that life his son lived also. 

2. But there is a deeper truth in these words: 
Christ's life is the guarantee of our spiritual life. 

Because he lives the Divine life of purity and love, 
so shall we. It is not only life beyond the grave that 
Christ promises to us, but that promise wraps up in it 
the assurance of a higher form of life — life in its spirit- 
ual elements. We are not simply to be conscious after 
death, to think, and feel and enjoy ; but that conscious- 
ness is to be a holy consciousness. It is not only that 
we are to live, but we are to live with God. W r e are 
not only to be, but to be in heaven. That follows 
from the ground of our hope of immortality: we are 
to live because Christ lives : i. e., our life is a direct 
stream from his. And as the fountain is, so must the 
streams be : if our life eternal flows out of Christ's life, 
it must be of the quality of that life. We are to be 
holy even as he is holy. 

It is singular to notice how the desire for continued 
existence dies out of men's souls, as the belief in God 
and the love of God dies out. It is a sort of testimony 
to the truth that the physical and lower intellectual 
life are only the scaffolding or material of the higher, 



1 62 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the life of faith and spiritual love, that when men lose 
faith, and break off from communion with God, the 
desire for life lessens. What is the use of the scaffold- 
ing when there is no building to go up : let it fall. 
And so men do let it fall. How little men care for 
immortality when all their life is earthly! Take the 
sensualist: what a feeble interest he takes in the ques- 
tion of a future existence — he thinks of going out at 
last like a candle with almost utter indifference. The 
godless workman at his bench discusses with his fel- 
low workman what death is, and agrees with a sort of 
dull satisfaction that to die is only to become nothing. 
When one dies, he says, he is like a dog, that is the 
end of him. And the unbelieving philospher is on 
the same level with the ignorant workman. When 
Prof. Clifford, the great atheistic mathematician, was 
dying, he professed that he did not know whether he 
would live beyond the grave, and that he did not care. 
When Harriet Martineau was asked in her last days if 
she did not wish for immortality, she answered: " No," 
that she had had enough of life here, and did not 
care to have another. And why should they ? — if life 
is only to eat and drink, to feel and know the facts 
of earthly existence, why should one want to go on 
trying it over and over again ? Man was made to live 
with God, and that life is endless, inexhaustible ; it is 
like a river that deepens and widens as it goes. But 
if there is no God, or if a man does not love him or 
live with him, then life loses its power of sustained 
interest ; an existence here uses up its capacity for en- 



ETERNAL LIFE. I03 

joyment; sixty years are enough. Life without God is 
like the river that flows into the desert, .it is drunk up 
by the sands, every year it narrows and shallows ; and 
at last it has no moisture left, and the man at three- 
score, says, " I am weary of the world, I am weary of 
myself; let me sleep. " Why should he want to wake, 
to try the weary thing over again ? 

We can go further: as the spiritual part withers 
and is paralyzed, leaving only the animal and the 
lower intellectual, we should expect men to lose their 
attachment even to this life. And so it is: what a 
strange fact is the indifference with which the more 
irreligious races of men front death! The Chinese, for 
instance, are the nearest to a people without a religion 
that can be found among the great races ; they are 
practically atheists, with no belief in a future life; and 
there men are to be found who are willing to sell their 
lives for a paltry sum of money. Criminals can buy 
men for a few dollars to go to the place of execution 
in their stead. What does it mean but that as the 
soul loses its grasp on God, it loses its grasp on life? 

Now turn to the other side: Where is it that life is 
most prized ? To whom does it grow more and more 
precious? Surely it is among the nations that are 
called Christian. Just in proportion as a community 
receives the light of Christ's presence, does the sanctity 
of life grow more awful; because it is only in societies 
colored and possessed with the Christian idea that life 
reveals its deeper possibilities. And among those 
peoples it is to those specially who are most inti- 



I64 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

mately Christian that life grows deeper and fuller on 
and on to the end. Let a man love God, let him 
know Christ, let him live the life of faith and spiritual 
affection, carrying the consciousness of Christ's pres- 
ence with him, and the longer he lives the more 
precious does this treasure of life seem to him. The 
thrill of love, the blessedness of purity, the enlarging 
vision that charity brings, the deep incommunicable 
sense of the Divine presence, the brightening hope 
that is burning ever more ardently, all these enlarge 
existence; they give it infinite scope. It seems such 
a great thing to be ever growing, ever loving more, 
serving more perfectly, adoring more devoutly : every 
year the man has climbed a higher range and looked 
out on a wider prospect; every year the treasure of 
the mysterious life with God has grown more un- 
speakably rich ; and when the shadows of death begin 
to fall over his path, though the world does fade, and 
he is willing it should fade, that jewel of the Divine 
life in his soul shines brighter; in the darkness of the 
tomb it does but glow more deeply. Ask him what 
he thinks of everlasting life, and his heart leaps up 
with an inextinguishable longing as he says, " It is to 
know God; it is to see his face; it is to be with Christ!" 
Christ's assurance of life, then, is the assurance of 
deepening holiness. " Because I live the Divine life 
of purity and love," he says, "ye also shall live it: 
because it is from me it shall go on deepening and 
broadening." This assurance that our spiritual life 
has its root not in us but in one above us, is the very 



ETERNAL LIFE. 1 65 

mark that distinguishes Christian righteousness from 
all others. There was virtue in the world before 
Christ came: the heathen had their saints, their ex- 
emplars, and in many qualities they attained a great 
perfection ; courage, temperance, truth, justice — surely 
we find these scattered here and there through the 
history of paganism. And let us not fear to admit 
that outside the church, in men that are not conscious 
of any inspiration above themselves, great virtues are 
cultivated among us to-day. I do not believe, indeed, 
there is any goodness that has not its root in a Divine 
source: wherever there is any gleam of righteous liv- 
ing it is from him who, coming into the world from 
the beginning as the Light, lighteth every man. Of 
all such we may believe God says, as he said of Cyrus, 
"I orirded thee, though thou hast not known me;" 
but it is a goodness unconscious of its source, it is a 
child that knows not its Father. And as such it is a 
one-sided, deeply deficient goodness : real holiness, as 
meekness, humility, spiritual affection, it knows nothing 
of; and as an orphaned goodness, having a father, but 
not knowing him, it is a melancholy goodness, doubt- 
ful of itself, not sure of its future. 

Now the mark of the Christian character is that it 
knows its origin : " by the grace of God," it says, " / am 
what I am! 1 It is as though holiness were a light that 
revealed not only its own brightness, but also its 
source. Yes, that is the very truth about it: "Because 
I live," says Christ, u ye shall live also"; and then the 
heart of the believer answers back, " I live ; yet not I. 
but Christ liveth in me." 



1 66 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

What a sense of security and hope does that knowl- 
edge breathe into the soul ! We are conscious that we 
are weak; we know there is much in us that is quite 
beyond our control ; but above all distrust of the evil 
within, and over all the threatening roar of the tempt- 
ing world without, comes the word of Christ, "Be- 
cause I live, ye shall live also." 

That word is not a mere figure of speech : it ex- 
presses a literal fact. It declares the life in our soul to 
be really the life of Christ; that to be his disciple is to 
be in him. How plain it is that Christ never contem- 
plated the work of a mere teacher, the founding of a 
school or party, to be his mission. When Nicodemus 
came to him it was simply as a learner to a new in- 
structor. " Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher 
come from God." But Christ puts all his notions aside, 
" Except a man be born again, he cannot see the king- 
dom of God." What you need, he says, is not more 
light, a system of theology, a code of morals — not, even, 
shining examples, stirring motives, but an inner prin- 
ciple, a new life: " I am the life." He turns to his own 
disciples : " I am the vine, ye are the branches — abide 
in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit 
of itself, except it abide in the vine ; no more can ye, 
except ye abide in me." 

Now I have tried to open this great saying of Christ 
to see what hope and strength it may yield. If we have 
really fathomed it, it seems to me, it does yield the 
truest strength and hope. It shows us that the life 
beyond the grave is safe; it is bound up in the undy- 



ETERNAL LIFE. 1 67 

ing existence of him that liveth, and was dead, and is 
alive for evermore. It shows us too, that the inner, 
spiritual life, for which all else is only the scaffolding 
and preparation, the existence of love and faith and 
goodness in us, is not something conjured up by our 
fancy, sustained by our resolution, the fruit of our con- 
science and will, but that it is a stream from the undying 
goodness, Christ himself. Every pious thought, every 
self-denial, every sacrifice for others, every triumph 
over temptation, every prayer lifting our hearts to God 
is a witness of Christ with us, in us. The light that is 
in us shows not only itself, but also the inexhaustible 
sun of righteousness from which it comes. What a 
thought that is, that every meek temper, every holy 
purpose, every faithful deed, has stamped on its bosom 
the image and presence of the invisible God! But is 
it not true ? Look at what you are, my brother, at 
your consciousness that you do believe and love and 
serve God, at this conviction of loyalty which rises in 
your heart so that you can say with the Apostle, 
" Lord, thou knowest all things ; thou knowest that I 
love thee" — and do you not know that this very love 
and trust is from above; that it is not you that live, 
but Christ that liveth in you ? 

Let us keep in mind, then, what our life is ; that it 
issues forth from Christ's great Divine life — yea, that it 
is his own. We may not be always directly conscious 
that it is his, any more than we are conscious of the 
mighty force which is continually drawing the earth 
on in ifs course, brincnncr in their time the seasons, 



1 68 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

and the changes of day and night. Yet we have only 
to pause and think, and instantly we know it is so, that 
the earth does not move itself, nor by its own life 
bring summer and autumn. And so an instant's 
pause in the soul, and we know who it is that gives us 
spiritual life. 

This ought to sanctify, too, and ennoble all the busi- 
ness of the Christian. Often, as we are conscious only 
of what is immediately about us, life seems a small 
thing, and our daily duties look sadly petty : we are 
buying and selling, writing and sewing, doing little 
things in a little place — it is all so little; so it seems to 
the mother, the teacher, the servant, the clerk. There 
is nothing great or worthy in it all : so it seems. But 
remember, in each small duty, if we do it faithfully, 
the life of the great God is beating through us. As 
the tiny wave laps up the beach of some narrow cove, 
what a little thing it seems; but it is the pulse of the 
great ocean rolling round the globe, it is the sweep of 
heavenly bodies pressing on that ocean that is pulsing 
in that tiny wave. What in our life of duty can be 
small, if only we feel it is Christ's life that is moving 
in us? 

Finally, let this thought shine into our hearts with 
the light of a great hope. Life at times is like dwell- 
ing in a narrow court; no horizon beckons forth the 
gaze of the dweller there ; no prospect, almost no sun- 
light appears, only sordid bounds, gloomy half-lights, 
and a sense of being shut in, buried in a narrow pres- 
ent. But if Christ lives, and I live with him, then a 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1 69 

window opens in the dingy walls : I look beyond; the 
prospect of eternity sends its glory down into my 
narrow present. When Jesus says, " Because I live, 
ye shall live also," then I look out on that eternal ex- 
istence; the cramping bounds have disappeared: "It 
doth not yet appear what we shall be;" and the glory 
of the life to come shines down on my dingy to- 
day, as the sun shines down into the poor murky 
court, and lights up all its pettiness with the mystery 
and glory of light from heaven. " It doth not yet ap- 
pear what we shall be;" but this we know: " Because 
he lives, we shall live also." 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 



1 Cor. vi: 19, 20. — "Ye are not your own: for ye are bought with 
a price." 

The text strikes a blow at one of the fondest dreams 
of the human heart — the dream of an absolute inde- 
pendence. The boy dreams of the day when he will 
be a man, and when he comes to be a man, poverty is 
his master. The poor man dreams of the day when he 
shall be rich, and when he is rich, society binds its 
fetters on him. The rich man dreams of rank and office 
that shall give him independence, but in vain; and so 
the illusion goes floating before one and another. 
Dreams, all dreams ; there is no such thing as perfect 
independence. 



1^0 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

We see this from the simple facts of life. Take 
the difference in freedom as the boy sees it looking 
forward, and as the man sees it who has come into it. 
The boy says, " When I am a man I will eat and drink 
what I please ; I will go to bed and get up as I choose." 
He fancies he will have a free body and a free time. 
But he tries it : he does eat and drink as he pleases ; 
he plunges into dissipation. His friends say, " That 
will not do; you must hold up"; and he fires up— "Am 
I not a free man ? I am of age, independent ; no one 
shall dictate to me." But one does dictate to him. 
His body dictates. It says to him after a debauch, 
" Lie there and ache" ; and there he lies and aches till 
nature, that owns his body more than he, lets him up. 
Then, if he is not incorrigible he says, " I see my body 
is not my own ; it will not serve me but as its Maker 
ordains. And my time is not my own : if I am idle in 
summer, then I must starve in winter." Life teaches 
him that much, and more than that. It teaches him 
that a man is not free to behave as he pleases towards 
others. The boy often thinks it hard that he has to 
learn rules of politeness, to be deferential to people he 
cares nothing for, to give way when he wants his own 
way. He thinks he will manage things differently 
when once he is independent. He tries that, too. He 
looks out only for himself; he shoulders his way 
through life, regardless of whom he jostles. He says, 
" Can I not do as I please with my own ? — and my 
looks and words are my own." And then he finds 
that the man who goes alone will be left to go alone : 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. I7I 

he has cared for no man, and no man cares for him. 
He finds life very cold and hard. It is reading him the 
stern, sharp lesson that a man is not his own : "A man 
that hath friends must show himself friendly." Per- 
haps he thinks he can be independent in religion. 
Why should a man be tied down to prayer and church- 
going and Bible-reading, to all this strictness ? — and he 
goes his way reckless, pagan. But he finds that after 
all conscience is not his own : it will plague him for 
his reckless life ; it gives him many gloomy hours ; he 
is. like a child — afraid of the dark in his soul. Inde- 
pendent in religion ! — why, life before him and behind 
is hung with clouds of gloom. He finds that his 
conscience, his moral sense, his religious nature, call 
it what you will, is not his own. 

I will go no further: I only say, all this means posses- 
sion by another. Everywhere in life we run up against 
invisible barriers, but of adamant, that say, "Thus far 
and no farther." And it is not the Bible, prophets, and 
apostles that are saying this, but the common, hard 
facts of life. To the profligate, disease says, with every 
wrench of pain, " Ye are not your own ; your body is 
not your own." To the cold and selfish, a lonely life 
without friends is repeating, " Ye are not your own ; 
your behaviour is not your own." To the irreligious, 
the pangs of remorse, the emptiness of the soul are 
crying, " Ye are not your own ; life is not your own !" 

This, then, is natural religion, the law written in 
man's nature, built up in the structure of life. And 
this is a part of the revelation given in the Bible, as the 



\J2 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

foundation is a part of the building. " Ye are not your 
own," says the Apostle, "no man liveth to himself — 
we are members one of another." All this is natural 
religion. But the Apostle introduces a new element ; 
he brings in the Christian side of the doctrine : "Ye 
are bought with a price." This takes us to Calvary, 
and bids us read the lesson in the light of the cross. 

And now, what does the cross say to this dream of 
human independence ? Whatever may be the facts 
about natural law, have we a right to ourselves ? No, 
says the Apostle, for " ye are bought with a price." 
You were the slaves of sin, but Christ has redeemed 
you. You once had life and dropped it into the sea, 
and it has been rescued and given you again. And 
that has laid a great debt oh you, the debt of gratitude. 
What a debt it is ! God himself has suffered for you. 
You have been born to life again by a dreadful tra- 
vail. 

And this, says the Apostle, makes a deeper claim on 
us: here is something that your own heart will not let 
you disown. 

We are not our own, because Christ's death for us 
has laid on us the claim of gratitude. Whatever else 
the cross may mean, and it does mean far more than 
we can ever fathom, it certainly means that. " Who 
loved me," says St. Paul, "and gave himself for me." 
He felt it : his whole life was a willing acknowledg- 
ment of the debt. 

I do not pretend to show here all that Christ's sac- 
rifice has done for us : St. Paul himself seems to stam- 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1 73 

mer and stagger under the great weight of that 
thought of redemption ; all the figures and compari- 
sons he can gather, and he ransacks the universe for 
them, fail to express his sense of the greatness of the 
rescue : he was in darkness, and light of day had burst 
in on him; he was a prisoner, buried in his dungeon, 
and the deliverer broke open his prison-house ; he was 
a debtor sold into slavery for his debts, and this friend 
ransomed him at an unspeakable price; he was an 
exile wandering in dreary, distant lands, and this 
messenger brought him home again. But one thing 
Christ's redemption does mean, it means restoration : 
one sentence of St. Peter expresses this most elo- 
quently, " He suffered for sin that he might bring 
us to God." That sums up the greatness of our debt: 
we are restored. The gulf between us and God is 
bridged ; the shadow is chased away ; the distrust that 
sin distilled in the heart is abolished. 

But now, suppose we have come back ; suppose the 
barrier removed, the fear quenched, the old life with 
God re-knit, and that we are children in our Father's 
house once more. What an entirely new conscious- 
ness comes into our life. We are restored ; we have 
lost something and got it again. 

There is something in the experience of losing a 
blessing and then getting it back that makes the bless- 
ing doubly dear. You must part with your happiness, 
and receive it again, before you really know what hap- 
piness is. Suppose a man has never been sick, what 
does he know of the deep blessing of health ? But he 



174 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

falls ill ; he goes down into the dreary valley of nights 
of watching and days of pain ; and then he recovers ; 
and as he sits at the open window and sees the deep 
blue sky, hears the song of the birds, and scents the 
honeysuckle on the wall, he seems to himself never 
before to have known what life was. One hour now 
is fuller of joy than a week of his old rude health. 
He will never forget that experience, and he has 
learned it by losing a blessing and then getting it 
back. You think you love your child with all the 
sense of its preciousness it is possible to have ; but if 
you have never watched it sicken and droop and fade 
away — never gone with it to the door of the tomb, and 
in heart given it back into the hand of God, saying, 
" If it be possible . . . but thy will be done" ; and 
then received it back again as from the dead — then, I 
say, you have not measured all the depth of a parent's 
love. What must Isaac have been to Abraham when 
the father had seen his beloved son swallowed up as 
it were in the abyss, and then received him as one 
restored from the dead. 

And now, to be a Christian is not simply to be a 
son of God ; it is to be a restored son. Here, in our 
Father's house, cleansed and clothed and feasted, we 
remember when we were in rags and filth, and full of 
evil passions ; and with every throb of love to God 
there comes to us this thought, "Ye are bought with 
a price." Do you think the Prodigal in the best robe, 
with the ring on his finger, sitting at the feast, did not 
have a thrill of grateful reverence as he remembered 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1 75 

the husks he tried to eat, and the misery of that far-off 
land, such as the elder brother, who had never left the 
father's house, could not know? 

But the Apostle goes farther ; he impresses it on us 
that Christ's death was a service of love. It is difficult 
to find a theory of the atonement that will satisfy all 
minds. Perhaps we shall never agree on one that 
answers at all points. We cannot complete the circle. 
Our theory keeps up with the facts a little way, and 
then the lines diverge : we cannot make them fit our 
system. It may be we are trying to explain the inex- 
plicable. What if we are seeking the neatness and 
lucidity of a geometric problem in a mystery much of 
the power of which is that we cannot understand it, 
that it fades away in the dim distance of God's impen- 
etrable counsels ? But one thing we know it does 
mean — it interprets to us God's unspeakable love. 
Christ's death is always figured in the Scriptures as 
-.lowing from his deep pity. It expresses the love of 
the Father, and the love of the Son : in this the Father 
and the Son are one ; " God so loved the world that he 
gave his only-begotten son that whosoever believeth 
in him should not perish"; . . , "he loved me and 
gave himself for me." 

Here, then, is a great service of love, rendered at a 
great cost. But every such service is a bond. It 
makes a debt ; it takes hold of me. I know there are 
some who do not feel it so. Men may die for them, 
and never a throb of devotion answer back. There 
have been children who could let their parents toil and 



I76 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

save and sacrifice for them, and never know one an- 
swering thought of gratitude. But that is not the 
natural law of the human heart. There is something 
in great masses of men that answers back to an unself- 
ish devotion. This has made popular heroes along 
the ages of history. A man gives himself for his coun- 
try, and his fellow-men recognize the debt ; they 
sacredly cherish his name. Or a great benefactor dies 
for the cause of humanity, for the prisoner, the slave ; 
and the human heart takes up his life and embalms it 
in loving songs and hallowed memories. What do we 
think of one who has had some great benefit procured 
for him by another's suffering, and then turns his back 
on his benefactor ? Why, we revolt from him as from 
a moral monster. We wonder how he can be insensi- 
ble to that bond. It is true that selfishness, worldli- 
ness, may overcome the power of such a bond: men 
may hear of a Saviour's death, and go away and forget 
it; they may refuse to feel it. But the natural thing 
is for them to acknowledge it, to be drawn by it. And 
this is what the Apostle appeals to when he says, " Ye 
are bought with a price." A man will often do for 
love what he will not do from any mere cold sense of 
duty. Many a young fellow when he steps on the 
Commencement stage cares for his success more be- 
cause his father and sisters are caring for it, than for 
the thin^ itself. He stru^o-les for them : their love and 
sacrifice for him are like a touch of life. What would 
the best of us be if that spur were taken away, if we 
did not feel the blessed bond of affection and service 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1 77 

from devoted hearts drawing us to do our best? "We 
are bought with a price," if we may use such sacred 
words for the common ties of life, by our mothers and 
sisters and children, by our friends — by our servants, 
even. When the present Emperor of Germany was a 
prince, his coachman saved his life at the loss of his 
own. And now, how does the emperor remember 
that service ? Years have passed, but at every anni- 
versary of the servant's death the emperor spends the 
day with the widow and her orphaned children. He 
has provided for their wants ; but that cannot satisfy 
his heart: he gives himself; and every year when the 
sorrowful day returns, he is with them. 

So it is that Christ's death speaks to us. It appeals 
to our hearts. From the dropping blood, from the last 
cry on the cross sounds a voice, " Ye are not your 
own ; ye are bought with a price !" 

Christ's redemption of us, then, has brought us, as 
it were, into his possession. Gratitude, love, the great 
rescue, all are saying, " You are his." Perhaps there 
are some who revolt from this. They do not wish to 
be subjected to another. Those words, "bought with 
a price," sound to them like a bargain in the market : 
they are purchased; they are bound; they must obey. 
How many chafe against that ! How many are kept 
from Christ because he is not only the Saviour, but also 
the Lord and Master. They are willing to be saved ; 
but they want to be free. As if the greatest salvation 
of all were not a salvation from ourselves, from the law- 
lessness, the passion, the perverseness of our own wills! 



I78 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

I say, then, of Christ's possession of us by his pur- 
chase on the cross that it is a blessed possession. Not 
to be our own means something more than giving up 
our present life ; it means the bringing of it into har- 
mony with the life of Christ. We do not silence our 
will, we only set it to a higher key: "Who died for us 
that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together 
with him" — live ! — mark that ; not to give up, but to 
get ; to live the great, full, satisfying life of Christ. 

Here in a great hall stand a number of musical in- 
struments. They are all silent, separate, each keeping 
its rigidity and key. But a musician comes in : he 
steps to an instrument and strikes a chord ; and all 
through the room the silent instruments wake up ; 
they answer; they have found a voice, and the swell 
of sound rolls through the hall ; but it is not they 
that are speaking, it is the musician that by his stroke 
possesses them. Now man's nature is just such an 
instrument. It is strung for melody, but it cannot 
make music of itself; a man cannot chord his own 
life; it takes a stronger touch than his. Who is there 
of us that can master his own life ? What a chaos of 
jarring passions, interests, wishes, riot in us till Christ 
stretches his hand over us and sets us to his own 
key! 

Is there any true progress to our lives, anything 
that is built up in them, any plan other than the plan 
of a kaleidoscope, changing at every turn, until we 
submit to our Master and say, "Lord, possess me; 
set me right ?" Suppose a man to have his own will ; 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1/9 

he plans his life for money, or fame, or pleasure, and 
what comes of it? Does he go tranquilly on? Re- 
call your own selfish plan; your purpose, and how 
did it work out? Did you not go forward like a ship 
in a sea full of currents ? First this passion, then that 
interest, and then the other fear seized it, and drove it 
here and there. And if our own plan is accomplished 
what a petty, unsatisfying thing it is ! There is not a 
millionaire, or ambitious schemer, or successful man 
of the world, who when he gets his end does not feel 
it shrink and become something too small for him. 
He has possessed himself, and he is dissatisfied. No ; 
himself he has never really possessed ; he has had his 
own way, but himself he has never been able really to 
grasp. His nature is too great for his hand to mas- 
ter; none but one can set it in tune, and bring it out, 
and give it completion ; none but he who bought us 
with a price that he might give us his own perfect life. 
For Christ's possession of us is really an inspiration 
upon life. It is one thing to obey ; it is altogether 
another to be swayed. Looked at from the outside to 
be not our own, to be another's, although that other 
be our Saviour himself, seems only a hard servitude. 
To be always doing another's will, forever crushing 
down our own, what a dreary prospect ! But to be 
not our own, I say, is to be inspired by Christ. It is 
giving up tugging at the oar, to lift the sail and be 
borne on with the rush of the gale. For what is in- 
spiration? It is to be breathed upon with an irre- 
sistible force. And to be Christ's is to be just so 



l8o SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

possessed, to be borne on by a new ancT vaster life. 
And that is a blessed state. What a great experience 
is an inspiration ! a something descending on us ! To 
be writing and feel a current of ideas breaking through 
our mind, so that we no longer hesitate, and erase, and 
rewrite, but let the pen race over the paper; to be 
speaking, and have a rush of emotion, of indignation, 
of enthusiasm, of pity, come to us, and sweep us on, 
so that it seems, not that we are speaking, but that 
another is speaking through us ; to be at work, and 
by a sudden rush of motive to be lifted into a new 
strength — this is a great joy. And not to be our own 
is to be so inspired. 

Even bad men have been able to inspire their friends 
with such a power. What a difference there is be- 
tween the soldiers of some dull, wooden martinet of 
a general, and those of a great captain like Napoleon. 
The troops of the stupid, cold general obey him; but 
how lifelessly they march, how stolidly they go into 
the fight! It is a hard drudgery. But when the great 
emperor rides down the line before the battle, every 
soldier tingles with enthusiasm; every man is a hero; 
they are not their own; and when the order comes, 
they sweep like a living wave over the field. He in- 
spires them. His great genius possesses the dull com- 
mon men, and they have a joy and thrill in fighting 
his battles — even in dying for him. What a picture 
is that of the dying soldier on the field of Marengo, 
shot through the breast, painfully lifting himself from 
the ground as his general rode past, to shout with his 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. l8 I 

last breath, fire flashing from his eyes, " Long live 
Napoleon." And if that great bad man could so 
possess men that it was a grand joy to be not their 
own, but his, what shall we say our great captain 
does for us? I say, brethren, it is a blessed thing to 
be not our own, to be bought by Christ's death, to be 
possessed by his life. So the great apostle felt when 
he flung away his own will, his own plan and pros- 
pect of life and cried, " I live, yet not I, but Christ 
liveth in me." 

Let us turn back now and see how this great truth 
of our possession by Christ can be applied to life. 
For the final test of a great Christian doctrine is, How 
does it work? If it is only a beautiful dream, a splen- 
did theory, a vision in the air, it is not of Christ, for 
he and his truth are for use. They are like the stirs 
which shine with the glory of the infinitely far and yet 
guide our steps along the earth. 

I say then in applying these thoughts that: 

1st. This shows us how to meet the checks and dis- 
appointments of life. 

Life is full of limitations; and experience is mide 
up very largely of striking against them. Failures, 
losses, disappointments, blunders, wrecks — how full 
every man's path is of these! Look back on your 
way, and see how many barriers you have come to in 
your past; walls built right across your chosen way. 
I care not what your lot has been, rich or poor, high 
or low, gifted or feeble. Your experience has been 
one of having your will crossed, your plans thwarted, 



1 82 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

your purposes baffled. Think of the countless ob- 
stacles you have met, sickness, poverty, the death of 
loved ones, the failure of those you trusted, perverse- 
ness of children, the withdrawal of gifts. It seems 
sometimes as if we were in a ship that was beating 
against head-winds all the way across the sea of life. 
Of course, there are great differences in men's paths 
and in the temperaments of men themselves ; but life 
to the most easy-going, I repeat, is full of hard pas- 
sages. It is continually saying to our wills, " No!" 

Now, what are we to do in such an experience? 
The best the world has ever been able to do for dis- 
appointed men is to give them the stoic philosophy ; it 
tells us to remember that it has always been so, that 
it cannot be helped, that we must set our teeth and 
bear it. That is stoicism — cold, hard, hopeless, with 
no outlook, no explanation, nothing but submission ; 
not to a kind, wise Father who sees the end from the 
beginning and who doeth all things well ; but to fate, 
blind, hard, cruel fate. A man's child dies and phi- 
losophy says, " Have fortitude; you had him, and now 
he is gone ; you must bear it." What consolation ! 
dust and ashes for the thirsting soul ! In the midst of 
joyful activities comes sickness, the end of one's life- 
work, a career wrecked; and what is the help? Only 
this — " It cannot be helped ; bear it." 

But Christ's possession of us puts another face on 
the disappointments of life. With the sense of that 
possession enfolding us, every loss and thwarting is 
only saying, " Ye are not your own; ye are bought." 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1 83 

Am I impoverished, bereaved, disappointed? This is 
God's use of me. My disappointment or failure is not 
an absolute disappointment or failure ; personally, it is 
true, I have not done what I wished, I have not had 
my way ; but then, that is no real evil, for I am not 
mine own — I am God's ; and what seems waste is only 
God's hidden use of me. All things are in his hands ; 
"he doeth all things well." In that all is my be- 
reavement, my loss of health, my poverty — " all things 
well!" Am I poor? this is God's message to me: 
" Remember, you are not your own !" God will not 
have me rich ; he will use me poor. Am I neglected, 
disappointed in the business of life? God is saying, 
" You are not your own ;" you are to be laid aside ; 
God wants you in obscurity. Am I lonely, friends 
departed, children gone — this is the solemn voice 
sounding out of the loneliness of life, " Ye are not 
your own;" God has chosen you for solitude. 

But you will say, this is no help. And I answer: 
No, it is no help to one who does not know God. 
But to a child, to a believing heart, there is no greater, 
deeper help, than to trace its trial, its pain, back to the 
blessed will of God. It is not my business to find 
help or consolation for those who do not trust or love 
God. There is no help possible for such a soul; you 
might as well expect bloom and fragrance from a 
blossom that has been torn away from its parent stem. 
There is no consolation, no light, no joy in the wide 
universe outside of God. And if a man says, " But it 
does not help me to send me back to God ; you might 



184 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

as well send me to fate, or to chance, or to an uncon- 
scious law" — then I can only say, " Poor soul!" If it 
be so, then there is no help for you ; if God cannot 
supply your emptiness and put substance into your 
life, then there is none else can : " To whom else can 
we go ?" If a man says, " Fate, law, chance, God, the 
Divine Father and Saviour, they are all one;" — then I 
say that contradicts the witness of all spiritual ex- 
perience. No man ever went to fate, or to chance, or 
to law, when his child died, or his health failed, or his 
property was swept away, and was comforted, fortified. 
There have been thousands of stoics, but not one that 
was happy and peaceful in the day of trial ; but there 
have been thousands who have gone to God at such 
times, and found in him refuge, light, life. You say 
in trouble, "Well, it cannot be helped; it is in the 
nature of things; I must submit;" and that is fate. 
Nothing answers back to that feeling, no sustaining 
power, no light. But say, " I am not my own ; I am 
God's ; I am bought with a price ; Christ died for 
me, and this is his will, and I accept it; I take it for 
my own will ;" — and then comes a flood of strength 
bursting in on the soul, uplifting it, inspiring it, filling 
it. There comes even more than this — then is felt the 
touch of a divine hand, the breath of an infinite pity, 
the warm pressure of God's own love; and we rejoice 
to live our disappointed, smitten, lonely life, because 
it is not we that live, but Christ that liveth in us. 

2d. This shows us also what is the true joy of life; 
it is to recognize and accept the Divine Inspiration. 



BOUGHT WITH A PRICE. 1 85 

There is one way of happiness: it is to have our own 
way; to lay out our plan what we would like to have, 
and then go on and get it. Sometimes you hear it 
said, that there is no happiness in having your own 
will. But it is not true. We have all sinned enough 
to know that there is a certain fierce, terrible pleasure 
in the swing of a lawless will. When a man is angry 
and he thirsts for revenge, and seeks it and gets it, 
there is a wild delight in wreaking vengeance. When 
a man craves power and plots for it, clutches it, has it, 
and gives his wish full rein, there is pleasure. When 
a man will not brook contradiction, throws off re- 
straint, and lets his will drive, reckless and determined, 
to its end, there is a satisfaction in it. If there were 
no pleasure in having our own way, would men seek 
to get it as they do ? But this way of happiness is a 
false way; it begins well, it goes prosperously for a 
time; but gradually it fails. It is like the streams 
that flow into the desert, which begin deep and broad, 
and then dwindle away into the vast sands smaller 
and smaller, till they vanish. The other way is to be 
possessed of God, to have no will of our own, but to 
be taken up into his. And this just reverses the 
order of life from having our own will and way. The 
blessedness of being possessed by God is very small 
at first. "Ye are not your own" — how' hard, how 
cruel that seems when we first say it to ourselves, and 
take it home in some agonizing loss, failure, misery. 
But it has a seed of life in it: it grows. Every sub- 
mission to that divine possession opens the gate of 



1 86 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the soul wider to God's entrance. It gives a keener 
hearing to the ear, a sharper seeing to the eye, and 
the pulse of the divine life beating through us becomes 
more palpable. We grow less, but God grows more. 
We are not having our own way, but God is having 
his way with us. His will is done in us, and that is 
the deepest of joys. 

I say there is nothing in existence comparable to 
this experience of feeling the life of God throbbing 
through us, as St. Paul felt it when he cried, " I live, 
and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me :" it is as if one 
toiling along a lonely road should feel his own 
strength grow less, but suddenly by some new sense 
catch the rush of flight with which the solid globe is 
sweeping through space ; he could afford to be weak 
while he felt that speed. And so to accept God's 
ownership of us in Jesus Christ, to say I am not 
mine own, I am bought with a price, is to catch the 
immense rush of life that issues from God; it is to be 
borne up on eagles' wings; this is to know God; this 
is life eternal. And will you not have that strength 
for yours? Will you not fling away that poor, weak 
self-will which clings so closely to its own indepen- 
dence, and yet is so slavish and helpless? If you 
would be really free and strong, if you would feel the 
sweep and scope of your true life, I bid you take 
Christ for yours. Let him possess you. Be rid of 
self; be filled with him. Let the love that has bought 
you claim its own. Be his; and then you will be 
most truly yourself. 



LIFE A PROBATION. 1 87 

LIFE A PROBATION. 



Matt, xxv: 14, 15, 19 — "The kingdom of heaven is as a man 
traveling into a far country, who called his own servants and delivered 
unto them his goods. And unto one he gave five talents, to another 
two, and to another one ; to every man according to his several ability ; 
and straightway took his journey. After a long time the lord of those 
servants cometh, and reckoneth with them." 

This familiar parable teaches the lesson of Proba- 
tion, the truth that life here is a trial of what we are, 
and a preparation for what is to come hereafter. Here 
then is an answer to the question which every serious 
mind must at some time put to itself. " What is the 
great end of life ? What am I here for ? What is it 
all about? Some, it is true, do not ask it : they never 
seem to have a thought that life has any plan or mean- 
ing at all; they simply take it as it comes; they drift 
on with the stream. 

But let us turn to the really serious, and what do 
they make of that question ? Some say the great end 
of life is to enjoy. They may differ as to what makes 
enjoyment, but they agree in this, that we are here to 
get as much satisfaction and comfort out of living as 
we can. We are made, they say, with these appetites 
and desires for gaiety, excitement, gratification, and it 
is clear that our Maker intended we should satisfy 
them; and as life is short, the best thing is just to get 
all the pleasure we can. "Gather the rosebuds while 
ye may," they sing, and up to the table of life they 
rush, and seize the cups and brim them over. But 



1 88 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

what an end for a creature like man ! It cannot be 
that we are here simply to enjoy each hour, to have 
pleasure; for if we were, why was a conscience given 
us? If we were made only to enjoy, then conscience 
lodged in each breast is a grand mistake. Conscience 
is always interfering with our enjoyments; it is the 
skeleton at the feast ; it is the cold shadow that sweeps 
over the festal scene ; it is the bit that pulls us up in 
the gayest hour. And our affections, too, those soft 
tender chords of the heart, how they interfere with 
pleasure. When we think how our hearts are wrung 
through our affections; how much more anguish 
comes through them than delight, who does not see 
how absurd the idea is that life was made for pleasure. 
If that were life's aim and purpose, we should have 
been made very differently — we should all have been 
made swine. 

So of riches as an end of life: men go on accumu- 
lating, as if to add field to field, to be richer each suc- 
ceeding year, was really a thing worth living for. 
But stand by the grave of some money-grubber, and 
as the grave-diggers shovel in the earth, think of what 
all that long-, anxious, shrewd, active life has come to — 
to rake together a heap of wealth, and then at the 
touch of death to go and leave it all ! Can that be the 
real end of living, is that what we are here for? Who 
can believe it? How absurd it seems ! 

Or, honor and fame ; to climb upon a pedestal where 
all men can see us, and then when the crowd is be- 
ginning to gather, and the huzzas are about to go up, 



LIFE A PROBATION. 1 89 

suddenly to be clutched by an iron hand and dragged 
away into the mist of the sepulchre, while men heap 
laurels on the pedestal where we stood — is that an end 
of life that seems satisfactory ? To be a Robert Burns, 
and sing songs distilled out of the bitterness and 
frenzy of the soul, and then die in poverty and disap- 
pointment, and then years after we are gone to have 
the world praise us, and celebrate our birthday — is 
that worth living for? What good does it do him to 
be praised? How does it help that wretched, pas- 
sionate, embittered life, that now the world knows he 
was a genius? Posthumous fame — what an end to 
live for ! 

Turn, now, from these theories of the end of life, and 
hear what the Great Teacher says, and what a differ- 
ence at once we feel : we come out of mist into the 
clear ; from the narrow, the petty, the unsatisfactory, 
to what is large and deep and adequate. Christ's 
view of life is that it is a probation, a time of trial, a 
preparation for something beyond. The whole of the 
Biblical view of life is lighted from above: it says in 
one way and another, the end of life is not here, it is 
beyond. " The kingdom of heaven is as a man travel- 
ing into a far country ; he calls his servants, gives 
each his portion, and then he leaves them. There 
they are all to themselves: no one watches them, 
none checks them, none advises ; they are free to 
idle, or revel, or abuse each other, or to do their 
duty; but it is clear enough what they are there for; 
they are to occupy for their lord, they are on trial. 



I9O SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Then after a time he returns, and he calls them to a 
reckoning : what have you done, where is your trust, 
how have you acquitted yourselves ? Well, that is a 
picture of life; our Lord has given each his place and 
work and gifts ; and he has gone away from us in the 
sense that we are left to choose our own way; and 
now what are we here for? What is the end of life? 
The end is the proving of us ; it is something going 
on, incomplete, that never can be complete till we pass 
beyond to judgment. Life is a story of which we be- 
gin to read the first chapter ; on and on we read, 
wondering how it will turn out, what is to come to 
the hero — when suddenly we turn the page, and the 
rest is gone, blank ; death has torn it out ; for the end 
we must wait and read the winding up in eternity. It 
is a problem ; there the figures are set, and we are to 
work them out : we begin the process, we are making 
progress, but suddenly the slate is snatched from our 
hands, the problem is wiped out — we must wait for 
the answer till the great reckoning of God solves it. 
It is a building of which we see the foundations, and 
the half-reared walls, enough to know there is a plan 
and a purpose, enough to make us eager to have it 
explained; but midway the builder is called away, 
there is no completion here : the end is beyond. 

But some one says, what a hard view of life that is ; 
it is too stern and sombre ! And to that we have to 
answer, that it is sombre : it is impossible to look at 
life as a probation, a trial and school to test us and 
fit us for a life beyond, and then enter on it as on a 



LIFE A PROBATION. I9I 

pleasure-excursion. But, then, look at it any way you 
will, and life is not a picnic, a tour of pleasure ; for 
the rule of life is that every part of it is a probation 
for what comes after. It seems a hard thing to say of 
childhood, that gleeful, careless time, when the days 
chase each other like laughing ripples over the shining 
stream, that it is a time of probation, a trial time ; but 
we know it is. Do we not know, those of us that are 
serious enough to think about our children's future at 
all, that now our boy is fixing what his manhood shall 
be ? Is it not true that this happy, laughing girl of 
ours is making decisions each day that are reacting 
on her character and gradually shutting up the possi- 
bilities of her future to one path ? That is why we are 
so anxious to put them in the right path, to lead them 
to choose the best things, to have them learn cour- 
age and self-control, and generosity and steadfastness ; 
we know that they are on trial for manhood and 
womanhood. When we see the boy restive under the 
discipline and drudgery of school, when he comes 
home and throws down his books and says, "There, 
I wish there were no schools ; theyr'e hateful, useless 
things ; let me go out and find a place," do we not trem- 
ble to see how he is failing in his trial, because we see 
how his day of reckoning is coming here, the day of 
his sober, clear-seeing manhood, when he will look 
back, and say, " Ah, if only I had not been so foolish ; 
if only I had drudged on and taken my schooling; if 
only I knew more;" that wretched time that so many 
come to as they look back and see how the school- 



192 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

time was their probation, and they were unfaithful. 
And so it is all along — every year is a trial time for 
the years that come after every new beginning of ex- 
perience—the first year in business, the first year to 
the newly married pair, the first congregation of the 
young minister — these are all special times of trial 
that fix irrevocably some part of the after-life. " I 
am a slave, to-day," says one of the greatest of living 
preachers, " to ways of work that were made within 
two or three years after beginning to preach." Well, 
if each period of life is the proving of us, the fixing 
of us for the periods that come beyond, and we do 
not think it a special hardship that it is so, why is it a 
hard view of life to say that life as a whole is a prepa- 
ration for life beyond ? 

On the other hand, what a clear, intelligible, serious 
view of life does this give! To come to a man who is 
fuming and fretting at the little ills and pains of living, 
all of them so petty and yet altogether so harassing, 
or to one bewildered by difficulties, the inequalities, 
the injustices of existence, and to say to them the end 
of life is not here, this existence is only preparatory, we 
are all on trial here, all at school, proving if we are 
worthy, being tested to show what is in us, being ham- 
mered into character and fitness for the great uses be- 
yond — I say, how that clears up life! It is like a cold, 
bracing wind that sweeps off the languid mist on the 
path, that shows afar off, the track we are to pursue, 
climbing the hills and dropping out of sight beyond 
the horizon. It may be cold, but it braces us up for 



LIFE A PROBATION. 1 93 

our work : it may be sombre, but it is clear, it is 
serious, it is worthy of such a creature as man. Such 
a view makes life worth living: it sets a high prize 
before us, it gives the thrill of a great aim, a purpose — 
in one word, it puts meaning into life. After reading 
that parable of the lord and his servants and accepting 
it, no man can go on whining that life is a riddle or a 
dream, or an empty purposeless thing. No, it is a 
race, a struggle, a work with a great and worthy end. 
Let us see how it clears up the atmosphere. First. 
It explains man's freedom. The master in the par- 
able took his journey into a far country; and he was 
gone a long time. What does that mean? It means 
freedom. And freedom is to character what air is to 
life; it does not make character, but it is the medium, 
the opportunity which character must have to form it- 
self, to show itself. And so man has been given a 
great deal of freedom. I do not mean political or 
social freedom; these have very little to do with a 
man's moral trial; but the freedom of choice, to go 
this way or that in moral things, to follow conscience 
or inclination, to be true or false, to be selfish or gener- 
ous. Of that kind of freedom there has always been 
abundance, for it is independent of all political or social 
conditions. St. Paul was free in that sense under Nero, 
as free as you or I in this Republic. God then does 
with us as the master did with his household. He 
asserts his rule and right over us, he does that by the 
voice of conscience in the soul; he gives us our place 
and work and gift, and then he leaves us very largely 
*3 



194 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

to ourselves. He goes into a far country. How far 
off for the most part he seems ! — so far that it is one of 
the griefs of an earnest, pious soul, that he seems so 
distant, so hidden, so dumb. We know that he is, we 
know his rule is right; always that soft but powerful 
voice speaks strongly enough never to let us be qui-te 
in the dark about him. But his presence does not 
overawe us ; it does not oppress and compel us to take 
this or that course. We are, like the servants in the 
household, free. 

Now to this condition of being set loose from a 
compelling or overpowering restraint men are con- 
tinually objecting as a serious fault. It would be 
better for us all, we hear it often said, if we were not 
so free; their liberty is the ruin of men. So there are 
whole schools of theorists who contend that what the 
world needs is more government, stronger rule, stricter 
restraints. Give us a church, they say, that binds 
men up, that watches and disciplines and follows its 
members closely; a church like that of Rome — and so 
it seems to such minds a puzzle, a blot on the divine 
government that men are morally so free. If God 
would only interfere more speedily, if he would arrest 
men in their folly, then how much better it would be : 
but now all things go as they will; men sin, and judg- 
ment does not overtake them; great iniquities rise and 
flourish, and no thunderbolt bursts on them out of the 
blue. 

But such people forget what life is — that it is a 
school, a place of trial. If the end of life were enjoy- 



LIFE A PROBATION. I95 

ment, that each one should be as happy as possible, 
then it would be better if there was less freedom. 
Then man's moral freedom ought to be restricted, and 
he should be allowed to do only what it was best for 
him to do; the Master should stand over him, as over 
a dumb beast, and drive him this way, and lead him 
that, and give him just what was best, and keep him 
in as a fattened swine. Or, if the great end of life is 
accumulation of wealth, why then, too, it would be 
better to tie men up and keep them in strict grooves. 
Then they ought to be like a hive of bees, where an 
irresistible instinct drives each one to do his best in 
the best way, so that the whole swarm produces as 
much honey as possible. If the business of life were 
to get as rich as possible, or to enjoy as much as pos- 
sible, freedom would be a great mistake. But then 
that is not the business of life. Christ says it is not: 
" a maris life consisteth not in the abundance of the 
things which lie possessetk" "the life is more than 
meat;" " what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole 
world and lose Ids own soul?" 

But apply the idea of the parable that life is a trial, 
that God is schooling us, that we are all making ready 
for the life eternal; and then we see the meaning of 
freedom. It is the air the soul must breathe while it 
stretches its limbs, and unfolds its nature, and shows 
what it is. It makes a very confused and uncomfort- 
able and topsy-turvy world ; but you do not go to the 
laboratory and workshop where the workman is testing 
his work, proving it, to find the perfect machine. You 



I96 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

do not go into the school-room to see harmony and 
finished minds. 

This then is part of our trial — that we are free, that 
we can go wrong and no hand reaches out of the in- 
visible world to make us go right — that we can mar 
our lives, waste them, stain them, and worse than that, 
waste and mar the lives about us — and the Master is 
silent. We can do it, for we are here to show what is 
in us to be ourselves, to make character, and the char- 
acter must have room to grow in, and that room is 
freedom. This is going on in life up and down, in all 
scales. You send your boy away to school: what, 
have you no schools at home? Yes, plenty; but 
home is too much of a restraint on him: you feel he 
will never form a strong, individual character; he is 
like an oak in a flower-pot. No, he must go out in 
the open. But he will be in danger; what a peril to be 
so free! But that is his trial, his testing, the indis- 
pensable element of air for his soul to breathe in. He 
may not stand it; but go he must, and you cannot go 
with him : no, you send him out to get him away from 
you; you are like the man in the parable, into his 
hands you put the talents, the chance, the opportunity, 
the means of his training, and then you go away, and 
you stay away. Well, God is your Father, and you 
must go to school ; you cannot be sheltered and apron- 
stringed into holiness; here into this wide, open school 
with its open windows where evil blows in on you, 
must you be sent, and God your dear, loving Father, 
must go and leave you. Not that he really deserts 



LIFE A PROBATION. 1 97 

you, but he does stand off and say, " Go alone." You 
must try it; you must be tried. 

Life is a serious business ! It is not merely sitting 
down at the feast to enjoy, or scrambling in the throng 
to get a good place. No, it is freedom to be tested; it 
is the proving us whether we be true or false, for God 
or Satan — what we are for eternity. While therefore 
the fact that there is so much freedom given to man 
may be a very sombre, sobering fact, it is not one that 
need perplex. We say if man is to be tried, he ought 
to be free. 

Secondly. It helps us also to understand the apparent 
injustice and inequalities of life. This is something 
which always oppresses a fair mind. It seems so un- 
just that men should be set as they are, some high 
and some low, some rich and some poor — some to 
whom all the good things of life are granted, and 
others whose whole history is but a struggle against 
adversity. And the sense of injustice and inequality is 
increased when we see how the advantages of a man's 
birth, and education, and surroundings, and opportu- 
nities, go very far to determine what sort of character 
he shall have, and what his destiny will be in another 
life. The protection, the training, the exemption from 
temptation, the incentives to a noble life of one well- 
born, give him not only this world, as the child of the 
poor, the ignorant, the vicious, cannot have it, but 
they seem even to smooth the way for him to be such 
a character as shall easiest enter the kingdom of 
heaven, too; while the poor, harassed, tempted, ill- 



I98 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

fed, uneducated child of adversity finds his hard life 
here shoving him down to vice and sin and despair of 
a world beyond. 

But that is all changed when we remember that life 
is only a probation. The rich man is on trial, and 
the poor man with him; the learned philosopher, and 
the ignorant day-laborer; he with the fine taste and 
delicate moral sense, and he who is dull and coarse. 
To each his position, his intelligence, his command of 
means, his natural sense of right and wrong, his op- 
portunities, or his lack of opportunity — all are simply 
the talents put into his keeping that the disposition, 
the wish that is in him, may be tested and discovered. 
The question is not how much can he do ? — how great 
advance does he make? — but, what will he do with 
what he has? And for that one place is as much a 
trial as another. Great gifts of mind, of will, of moral 
force ; large possessions in money, or influence, or 
social distinction, constitute of themselves a great 
responsibility, a mighty temptation. Lazarus looks 
at Dives, and as he shivers in the cold, he says, " Oh, 
how easy for him to be good ! he is never hungry ; he 
has no temptation to steal or to lie; and how much 
good he can do ; — it must be so easy to get to heaven 
when there are no temptations in the way." But then 
Lazarus forgets that merely to be honest, and con- 
tented, and to be thankful, and to be kind to the poor, 
will not fill up the measure of Dives' trial. " To whom 
much is given, of him is required the more. ,, This 
great, strong, rich, clear-sighted man will not get 



LIFE A PROBATION. 1 99 

off by bringing into the account just what is expected 
of Lazarus. The man with one talent, if he brings 
one talent more, is saluted, " Well done!" — but he who 
has had two talents and brings back but two, will be 
dismissed as unfaithful. And is it no trial to be put 
high, to be exempt from care for one's living, never to 
be dependent on another, to be free, never to know 
pain that pulls down, or poverty that hedges up the 
path? What a watch must that man keep over him- 
self whom no one else watches ; how hard it must be 
to be at the top, to be deferred to, to be flattered, to 
have no bar to one's will ! And then remember that all 
this is our trial; that God has set us so free to see 
what we will do with our freedom. I wonder some- 
times that princes ever enter the kingdom of heaven 
at all. Instead of all this power and wealth and free- 
dom making their way to heaven easier, it is that 
which tries their courage and faith. Think of the 
trial of having the wealth of a Rothschild, the power 
of a Gladstone, and yet to feel that it is all only a 
trust; that our money and power over men were only 
our trial. 

But then the low place, the hard lot, is a trial too ; 
as much so as the higher and easier. Dives, harassed, 
perplexed, conscious that his gifts like unmanageable 
horses are beginning to endanger him, looks out at 
Lazarus with no cares, no responsibilities, and he 
says, " how simple a thing being faithful is for the poor 
and weak: they have only to submit and trust; they 
have only to pray give this day our daily bread and 



200 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

then take. Lazarus' trial is easier than mine." And 
that too, is untrue. It is a trial to be poor, to be de- 
pendent. But what is apparent, is that in view of life 
as probation, all these differences, these inequalities and 
injustices melt away. One lot may be more comfort- 
able than another ; but looked on as probation it is 
hard to see that there is much difference in men's con- 
ditions here. They are all at school, some in high 
classes and some in low, some in velvet and some in 
home-spun, some in comfortable easy chairs, and a 
great many on hard, wooden benches — but the trial 
for all is the same. Are you faithful or not? — Here 
is your task: will you do it, or will you shirk it. 

TJiird. Another mystery this view helps to solve, 
and that is the apparent failures of life. 

We call a life a failure when we cannot see it com- 
pleted here. That is, we measure it by the worldly 
standard. Whatever a man sets out to do or to get, 
if he dies before he finishes that work or gets that 
possession, we have a feeling that life with him was a 
wreck: we say, "Well, his life was a failure." Now, I 
am not saying that the sudden snapping off of what 
promised to be a beautiful growth is not a sad thing to 
see ; or that to watch the clouds gather over the fair 
morning, and wrap it in gloom, and at last quench it in 
storm, is not something to make the heart ache. There 
is nothing that can take the sadness out of life : Christ 
himself does not do that — he only shows how, in him- 
self and for us, the sadness may be only the birth- 
pang to a deeper joy. But look at life as a probation, 



LIFE A PROBATION. 201 

and although it is still sad to see human plans dashed 
and human hopes frustrated, yet we can see that the 
sudden dropping of the curtain on a life but quarter 
played out, is not really a failure. Take a very com- 
mon case: here is a young man setting out on a high 
career, with every gift that can promise success. He 
enters on a course of useful activity, friends and fol- 
lowers are gathering about him, love and honor are 
ripening for him ; and then comes the fatal stroke — the 
career is cut short, the gifts are quenched, the hopes 
he had raised, the group he was leading, are scattered; 
and then as men stand about his grave and look at 
the ruin of that great career, they say, " What a wreck, 
what a failure; how mysterious it is, how such a his- 
tory takes all meaning out of life ! " But if life is a 
probation, we are not obliged to think that life a fail- 
ure. What was that man here for? To carry out 
that plan he had formed : to complete a certain work ? 
Doubtless, he had a work to do; his life and labor 
fitted into the great whole of God's kingdom here; but 
as far as that is concerned, we may leave it to God. 
He weaves the broken threads into his perfect fabric, 
and makes oar half-spun webs, our ravelled-out lives 
and threads cf purpose into completeness in his world- 
loom; the shattered life of a Martyn fills its place there 
as well as the long history of a Judson. But for the 
man himself, he was here to be tried, the purpose of 
his life reached beyond. And if God had proved him, 
and his probation was over, why should he go on to 
finish the task here? He had passed his examination, 



202 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

all the unfolding of his life could not prove him any 
more: why should he stay in the school to enjoy his 
easy seat and hear the murmured applause of the 
lookers-on? Let him pass beyond. It looks like 
failure here; but go round the curtain and see it on 
the other side, and it does not look like failure there. 
The same considerations apply to all those instances 
of plans for good which men undertake and are baffled 
in bringing to completion. A minister starts a church 
in some destitute place; a good man founds a school, 
or begins a reform ; and after a while, although they 
meant well and labored hard, circumstances compel 
them to give it up; they must lay down the work, and 
see another succeed where they failed — or more per- 
plexing still, the work itself is destroyed. And then 
comes despondency : they seem to have made nothing 
out of their life at all ; or else they are irritated and 
angry at others for their inefficiency or opposition. 
But do not such men forget what life is, that it is only 
a probation? What are you here for? Is it to build 
a church, or found a school, or carry out this or that 
reform? Have you not been forgetting, in your anxi- 
ety and absorption in the immediate prosperity of 
what you are doing, why it was that God permitted 
you to have a hand in that work — in short, that you 
are being tried and educated for life beyond? Sup- 
pose this or that thing has not turned out as you 
hoped; do you forget that it is only part of God's 
great plan, and that when he takes it out of your 
hand he will take care of its issue and effect for good? 



LIFE A PROBATION. 203 

But you, yourself — how have you stood your trial, 
what use have you made of your probation ? Do you 
not see that the great thing for you yourself is that 
you should have been found faithful, and whether you 
accomplished or did not accomplish what you set out 
to do, that you have been a loyal, true man through it 
all ? Suppose the man with the one talent had put his 
lord's money out to the usurers to the very best of 
his ability, and the usurers had gone suddenly into 
bankruptcy, would he not have been accounted a 
faithful servant and had his lord's approval ? 

Here, then, is a solemn, a grand view of life. How 
does it elevate our daily living and redeem it from the 
pettiness that is always insinuating itself into our 
thoughts and feelings about our own career. For that 
is one of the evils of life, as most men have to pursue 
it; it does stem petty. The daily round of duty in our 
callings, so monotonous, so hemmed in, so remote from 
the heroic; the little things we have given us to do — 
day after day to write, write; to sew, sew, sew; to 
cook and serve the same round of meals; to teach the 
old lessons : it is hard to live in these and not feel that 
Life is but an insignificant thing. The only way to 
rescue the soul from sinking into that poor slough is 
to remember that all this is only our probation, that the 
very dullness and monotony of life, its irksomeness and 
lack of excitement, is part of the trial. This lifts a 
corner of the curtain that shuts eternity from the 
present : then we feel in all the dryness and tedium 
of our lot that we are only waiting in the ante-room for 



204 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the doors to open that admit us to the Judge, to know 
whether we are accounted worthy. The decision is 
making for heaven or hell : it is making here in these 
common duties that every day is bringing us. 

Let us learn then to look at our life in this way. Let 
us see in our freedom a part of our trial and school- 
ing. There are times when there come to every man 
solemn thoughts of eternity ; a vision of God breaks 
through the dust of every-day. Religion is seen to 
be important, duty presses its claims, and the man is 
lifted above himself: he is not far from the kingdom. 
But that mood passes, those great and solemn thoughts 
fade out, and then the man is at ease again. And now 
without prayer, and having no life with God, he feels 
as comfortable as though he had obeyed his con- 
science. He says, " What does it matter whether one 
is religious or not? I prayed and was serious, and 
now 1 do not pray and am not serious, and I am quite 
as much at my ease: the irreligious man is just as 
happy as the religious." So he says. But he forgets 
that this is his trial, that the Master goes and leaves 
him undisturbed that he may be proved to the bottom. 
He forgets to say, my freedom is my probation. 

And then when life seems dull and monotonous, 
and it appears as if it were of small consequence how 
we did our work or whether we did it at all, because it 
is all so insignificant, then let us lift the curtain and let 
in the light from the eternal world on our narrow lot. 
The rich evening sunlight slanting across the fields 
glorifies every common weed, makes every ditch and 



LIFE A PROBATION. 205 

clod to glow with strange deep colors, and so to see 
every day's work in the light of the solemn final hour 
when every deed shall be weighed for eternity, that 
makes life great and serious. 

Look at your failures and losses, too, in the same 
light. You have lost your friends and loved ones, 
and life seems only a miserable mockery of hopes and 
affections. Not so : you are being tried ; you are being 
purified. You have failed in business, and men rush 
by you forgetting you, and you say you are of no use, 
you have accomplished nothing; yes, but \iyoit endure, 
if you come forth untarnished, brave, uncomplaining, 
then you have accomplished something: you will be 
crowned. But your good work has been baffled, 
your church is closed, your school abandoned ! Well, 
have you been faithful? have all these heavy strokes 
hammered your character into fineness? have you en- 
dured as seeing him that is invisible? Then, be of 
good courage, all is well. 

Presently the Lord comes : nearer and nearer 
through these weary, monotonous days he is drawing 
toward us. " The Lord of those servants cometh : " 
when the tramp of his host is heard echoing on the 
road, and his trumpet is sounding at the gate, what 
then will be our store, our office, our success or fail- 
ure, the drudgery or the joy of our work ? Then the 
tool will fall from our hand, our wealth will be for- 
gotten, the hand of the loved will drop from ours; for 
only one thought will fill all the soul — " Have I been 
faithful," have I endured my probation? Will he say, — 



206 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

tlie Lord when he enters his hall and looks on me and 
my work — "well done" ? Then am I blessed, then life 
is a success ; then my work is crowned, whether it 
have been the rule of a kingdom or the sweeping of a 
crossing. 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 



Hebrews xii. 2. " Looking unto Jesus." 
These words were written to encourage a company 
of disheartened men. They were addressed to the 
Hebrew Christians, who had left the old National 
Church to be followers of Christ. 

What a picture that sets before us ! We seem to 
see those early Christians, exiles from their old home, 
going out of the dignified and majestic Jewish Church 
and becoming members of a despised sect. Mocked, 
annoyed with petty persecutions, robbed, they are like 
emigrants who come from peaceful and venerable 
villages in an old land where everything is familiar, to 
a new land, where even the face of nature is strange. 
No wonder they were despondent; so much they had 
endured for Christ's sake, and even yet there seemed 
no end. 

It is to encourage these, then, that the writer sends 
this epistle. " Cast not away your confidence" he says, 
"ye have need of patience" And then he proceeds to 
set before them motives for encouragement; he brings 
them a stimulus. 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 207 

He appeals to their conscience — to their sense of 
right. " Let us lay aside the weight," he says; — the 
weight of fear and despondency ; and the sin which is 
so perculiarly besetting, this impatience, this feeling of 
restlessness under trial and sacrifice; for this is a sin. 
They know they ought to be brave, and that cowardice 
here is guilt. " Let us run the race," he urges; it is a 
race and a hard one, and often the temptation to 
slacken the pace, to throw one's self down in the lux- 
urious shade by the wayside, where so many are 
enjoying themselves, seems irresistible; but then it is 
the right course; all the power of conscience throws 
itself into the utterance, "you ought to run." There 
is power in that appeal, for it touches the chord which 
runs through every human heart, the sense of duty. 
It is a power we might use oftener than we do. We 
might begin to use it earlier with our children ; giving 
up something of our coaxing and personal influence 
to draw to what is right, to try oftener the naked force 
of conscience. It will not hurt our boys and girls to 
be thrown back clearly and sharply on that funda- 
mental impulse. Let us say to them, "You ought: 
this is right, this is wrong;" that is, when the right 
and wrong are clear and unmistakable. To appeal to 
such motives is a part of moral education; and the re- 
sponse will often come with enthusiasm. So Nelson 
sailed into battle with but one appeal to his fleet, the 
signal floating from his mast-head, " England expects 
every man to do his duty, to-day." 

He appeals also to their sense of fellowship with the 



20b SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

worthy dead. He takes them back through the long 
galleries of their ancestors that are opened to us in the 
tenth chapter of this epistle, that long roll of heroes. 
They were proud of those great names. Every Jew 
said, "We have Abraham for our father," and his heart 
swelled within him at the remembrance of Moses, 
and David, and the great memories that streamed 
down his history. Well, says the writer, these are 
all watching you : they fought their day, and never 
flinched, and now they are witnesses of how their 
children quit themselves: "We also are compassed 
about with a great cloud of witnesses ;" how can we 
murmur, how dare we flinch? Remember Abraham 
and Moses, Joshua and David, and play the coward 
if you can. That appeal must have thrilled every 
nerve of manhood in them. And that too is a just 
appeal. It is one that has always struck a deep 
response out of men's hearts. How the light of a 
noble man's life has streamed out across the world 
long after he has gone, and made his sons ashamed to 
do mean things in its brightness; how a mother's 
sweet charity has shone behind her like the glow of 
the summer sun after it is set, and made her daughters' 
kindle in its light. I have sometimes thought that a 
great and lofty life, like Washington's for instance, 
does as much for men in the long succession of gen- 
erations, by simply standing pillar-like along the 
track of men's lives, witnessing what unselfishness 
and nobleness are, as by all it ever accomplished in 
active work. When we are tempted to selfish ease, 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 200 

to cowardly shirking from duty, to mean thoughts of 
life, let us remember the great witnesses who stand 
over our path; the men of faith who endured and con- 
quered, and now watch to see us endure and conquer 
in our day. 

But there is yet another motive to be urged : it is an 
appeal to their loyalty to Christ. " Let us learn to be 
brave and faithful," he says, by " looking unto Jesus." 
You are discouraged, your strength is ebbing away. 
Well, there is yet one more inspiration for you: " Con- 
sider him that endured such contradiction of sinners 
against himself, that ye be not wearied and faint." 

That motive to duty, the appeal to our loyalty 
to Christ's person, is the deepest and strongest that 
can be made. Everything else in religion leads up to 
that. 

In order to understand how strong that appeal must 
have been to these Hebrew Christians, we should have 
to go back through the entire epistle, and see how the 
whole interest is centered in one figure, on Christ. 
Under one form and another, it is he who is the 
supreme object of thought and affection. " The Son," 
"the great High Priest," " the true Melchisedec," "the 
One Sacrifice," "the Captain of their Salvation," "the 
Mediator of the New Covenant," "the Elder Brother" 
— they are all one. Each name and form is the symbol 
of a great truth, the expression of a profound doctrine 
of religion; but all are blended and lost in the person 
of Christ, the Divine Saviour, the perfect Friend, the 
loving Jesus. 
14 



210 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

He was God, " the brightness of the Father's glory, 
and the express image of his person." He was the 
mighty Deliverer, "the great High Priest that has 
passed into the heavens." He was the suffering Man, 
"touched with the feeling of their infirmities, because 
tried in all points like as they ; who had learned obe- 
dience by suffering, just as they were learning that 
hard lesson. And he was the loving brother, close to 
them, of their own nature, " not ashamed to call them 
brethren :" though so resplendent in perfection, though 
holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners, 
yet joined to them in flesh and blood to deliver them. 
What a vision that was ! 

What the writer does, then, is to take the natural 
impulse of loyalty to a leader, and attach it to the 
person of Christ. And what a power that passion of 
loyalty has been in the world ! How it has lifted up 
slaves to make them heroes ; how it has put a soul of 
unselfishness into the hard soldier; how it has inspired 
with something of thought and spirituality the dull, 
stupid masses ! It casts a redeeming color over the 
dark career of a Napoleon, to see how the loyalty of 
his men clung to him — how, from the marshal at the 
head of his columns down to the private in the ranks, 
even to the drummer boys, they served him with an 
idolatrous devotion : how they fought for him ; died 
for him! One almost finds a compensation to the 
young men of France whom he sent so mercilessly to 
slaughter, that he gave them such an inspiration of 
loyalty ; for is it not better to be devoted to a Napo- 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 2 I I 

leon even, than to live on in cold, contracted self-con- 
sideration all one's days ? 

But it does not need a Napoleon to waken loyalty. 
It is a part of universal human nature. It makes the 
child eager to do the parent's will : Many a young 
man goes on reading his Bible in the city crush and 
rush, not because he cares for the sacred book, but 
because of his promise to the dear mother in the far- 
off village. It appears in the church, even when it 
does not reach up to the heaven of the church. What 
pastor has not had members who would do for him 
what they would not do because it was right, nor be- 
cause it was good for them, or honoring to Christ? 
How often have we felt like saying to some warm 
friend, "Ah, if you would only do for your Master's 
sake, what you are so ready to do for mine!" How sad 
to be loyal to home, and state, and earthly leader, and 
cold only to him who makes parent, and pastor, and 
captain worth loving. What we want is not less devo- 
tion to friend, and teacher, to the hero, the worthy 
leader, but more devotion to the Friend of friends, to 
the Great Teacher, to Jesus Christ, the man of men. 

The lesson of the text, then, is that we ought to use 
this force of loyalty to Christ in our living more than 
we do. We should be "looking unto Jesus" much 
more than we are. Especially would I emphasize the 
necessity of making our loyalty more practical. Per- 
haps the reason there are not more lives devoted to 
Christ is that those who are loyal, shut up their loyalty 
from their common living. We are faithful to our 



212 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Lord in our creed, and in the closet; we insist in our 
creed that he is the True God, the Holy One, and 
True Man, the loving and lovable ; and in the hour of 
prayer we worship that adorable life, at once so spot- 
less and so sympathetic, so true and yet so tender, 
so holy and yet so human; but when we go down 
from our transfiguration mount to plod along the com- 
mon road we are apt to leave this force of loyalty be- 
hind and take with us only that slow companion, duty. 
Our loyalty to Christ, I fear, is unproductive to us and 
dim to others, because it is kept too close in the closet, 
and the prayer-meeting. What it needs for strength 
and color is to be brought into the common air. What 
we want is that Christ should be to us a daily leader 
and inspiration. But how shall we secure that? 

Let me indicate one or two ways. 

First. The simplest of all ways is to see what he does 
in circumstances like our own. We must take with us 
into the dust of every day the inspiration of the closet. 
That inspiration was the vision of Christ's perfection ; 
and what we need for our day's work, is the vision of 
the perfect Christ, doing Ids day's work. " Look to 
Jesus " not merely for the rapture of spiritual beauty, 
but to see how he lives, endures, meets difficulty, dis- 
couragement, pain : in short, learn obedience. 

For instance: when our service to men is met by in- 
gratitude, we must meet the chill with the vision of 
Christ's action under the like circumstances. We all 
know what it is to meet men whom we have befriended 
with time, money, sympathy, the best we had, and 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 21 3 

then have them pass us by as though we were 
strangers. And then comes the sense of failure, of 
bewilderment, of skepticism as to men's capacity for 
rescue. I doubt whether the mere sense of duty can 
meet that. Conscientiousness will perhaps enable us 
to forgive the ingrate; but it will hardly give us heart 
to go on doing good to others who may turn out in- 
grates too. But loyalty to Christ can do that. In- 
stead of speculating about human nature, or comment- 
ing on its baseness, I turn round and " look unto 
Jesus;" I watch him as he gazes with wounded heart 
after the nine lepers that are hurrying unthankful away; 
and when I mark how he goes on unhesitatingly in 
his way of blessing, wounded, but unchilled, unem- 
bittered, I forget my depression. To watch this is to 
feel as the soldier who sees his captain's plume flashing 
before him in the thick of the fight. 

Or, suppose we are depressed by the stupidity of 
the men we are trying to save. That depression will 
take one of two forms, according to what happens to 
be uppermost in our mood. If it is the Pharisee that 
is uppermost, the stupid sinner will awaken our con- 
tempt; if it is the Sadducee, then it will be our de- 
spair. In either case we are shorn of our strength : 
we can never follow Christ in doing men good, either 
despising or despairing of them. But, how can I 
help feeling the one or the other? Well, loyalty to 
Jesus must come in to help you. " Look to Jesus." 
Look at him as he talks with the woman of Samaria. 
Who could be more stupid, earthly, frivolous, than 



214 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

she? but he does not despise her; he does not despair 
of her. With what infinite patience he tries each en- 
trance-way to her soul? When we see that, we forget 
how stupid men are; or, rather, we feel how stupid 
and earthly is our impatience; we feel how unlike him 
we are ; and we burn to try at the copy he has set us, 
once more. 

Or, perhaps, we are not called to active service. 
Ours is the passive lot, to wait, to suffer or, harder 
still, after a life of activity, our history is broken in 
two, and from the busy world we are turned aside into 
the silent room, simply to endure We are never to 
be busy again. As in heaven some at God's 

— " bidding speed, 

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;" 

whilst others 

"serve who only stand and wait;" 

So our service here may be only to wait, to suffer, to 
bear pain and weariness for Christ. The incurable 
disease, the shut-up lot, the lost activity, the intoler- 
able pain: how can human nature bear these and 
keep its sweetness? Only by the sight of Jesus bear- 
ing his anguish, drinking his cup. " How," said one 
to a friend who had gone through a long and painful 
surgical treatment, " how could you endure to meet 
it?" "Well, I could not; it seemed I could never 
submit to it, till I remembered Christ on the cross; 
and then I thought if he could bear that for me, I 
could bear this for him. When the surgeon took the 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 215 

knife I just thought of him, and I was not afraid." 
For every case of weakness, the weakness that shrinks 
from work and the weakness that sinks under suffer- 
ing, there is but one cure : it is " looking unto Jesus," 
the vision of what he has done, of how he suffered. 

Secondly. But there is another way to make loyalty 
to Christ practical : it is by simplifying our motive, i. e. 
by doing our work more purely with reference to him. 
There is such a thing as multiplying machinery till 
we lose all our power in overcoming the friction; we 
often interpose between ourselves and the thing we 
ought to do, so many levers of arguments and reasons 
for doing it, that we have not force enough to reach 
through to the end. Now, loyalty to Christ simplifies 
this. It gives our life a direct power from the personal 
Christ. Seek the closet of prayer, for instance, because 
Jesus is waiting for you there; visit the sick because 
they are his ; forgive your enemies, because he has 
asked it; teach the ignorant and help the weak, be- 
cause they are his special care. This is the most 
direct exercise of loyalty ; and it is the Biblical way. 

Take, for instance, the duty of visiting the sick. 
One way to look at it is to consider its utility. 
"Why," says the natural man, "should I visit the 
sick? There are plenty of others to do it; it is very 
distasteful to me — particularly so; and what does it 
amount to, after all, beyond a little temporary diver- 
sion?" With such questions the sense of duty is 
frittered away. But how soon loyalty to Christ puts 
all that aside. Instead of getting my motive to duty 



2l6 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

from balancing questions of utility and expediency and 
necessity, I " look unto Jesus." I hear him say, " I 
was sick, and ye visited me; inasmuch as ye have 
done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it 
unto me." And my heart says, That sick man is 
Christ in disguise; whether to visit him is pleasant, 
or absolutely necessary, I am not sure; but that he is 
my Lord, I am sure; let me go quick and serve him! 
This was the argument Sister Dora, that ardent ser- 
vant of Christ, used to make her repulsive work at- 
tractive : " Look upon nursing," she said, " as work 
done for Christ. As you touch each patient, think it 
is Christ himself, and then virtue will come out of the 
touch to yourself. I have felt that myself when I 
have had a particularly loathsome patient." 

It is so, too, that we must take up the business of 
preaching and teaching the Word. We must do it in 
the spirit of personal loyalty. We must not forget, 
indeed, that it is the truth, the very truth, about God 
and man and his destiny; we may fortify ourselves by 
eveiy reasoning to show that it is suited to man, that 
it will be useful to him ; we may encourage ourselves 
with the delightful picture of what it will presently do 
for those we teach. But deepest of all, most strongly 
impelling, if we would be brave and effective, must be 
this, ''It is the word of Jesus;" he is sending me; for 
him I speak first of all. Then when the audience is 
thin, or listless, when they go away without answering 
a word; when the class is half empty, and the children 
are restless and inattentive ; when they go home and 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 217 

leave you doubting whether you have reached in to 
touch them at all, you will not be heart-broken; 
though cast down, you will not be destroyed. That 
loyalty to Christ will do for you, when mere utility, or 
the sense of duty, or the conviction of the truth of 
what you have to teach, would fail to give you heart 
for the work. It was so that the great mission work 
of this century, which has girdled the globe with its 
conquest of heathen races to Christ, began. If men 
had waited till the utility of preaching the gospel to 
cannibals could have been demonstrated, if they had 
gone on mere probabilities, or counted up the chances 
of a few missionaries overturning the hoary establish- 
ments of paganism, there would never have been any 
foreign missions at all. But Christians began to " look 
to Jesus" with reference to the heathen. They heard 
his last words, so long stifled or explained away, com- 
ing to their ears once more: " Go ye into all the world 
and preach the gospel to every creature." And then, 
out of pure loyalty to him, they went. I think they 
must have felt, when they looked at the dreadful odds, 
somewhat as Peter when Christ bade him cast in the 
net, What hope is there? "Nevertheless at thy word 
we will let down the net." It did seem desperate. 
There were the islands of the sea, with the fierce can- 
nibals waiting on the shore to strike down the missionary; 
there were the great continents with their ramparts of 
caste and philosophy, and behind them the proud pagan 
sneering at the European's faith; and here were the 
handful of believing men setting out to convert them ! 



2l8 SELECTIONS FRQM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

How could they go ? Well, they could not, but for 
the deep personal loyalty which looked only to Jesus ; 
the loyalty that said, He has said it, and it is true ; he 
has commanded it, and I must obey; he has promised, 
and it cannot fail. Personal loyalty to Jesus : there is 
the secret of foreign missions, of all missions. 

And now all we have been saying resolves itself at 
last into this: that our religion needs to take a more 
personal form. It is more of the child's religion that 
we need; not, indeed, less of the man's, not less of 
understanding and solidity, of strength and endurance, 
but more of the warm personal element which makes 
up nearly the whole of a child's life. Think how it is 
a child conceives of duty, of right and wrong, of fidelity, 
guilt, service; is it not all in relation to a person? 
Duty is what it owes to its mother; right and wrong 
are all measured by her will. Guilt is to be under her 
displeasure, forgiveness is her smile. And how warm 
and fresh and enthusiastic all its moral and religious 
life is! What is purer, fresher, than a child's religion; 
but that religion is only the purest form of loyalty to 
a personal Jesus. Well, we need to take the child's 
attitude to Christ. Something of this was what Jesus 
meant when, to the disciples full of rivalries about the 
grades and ranks of the new kingdom, he said, " Ex- 
cept ye be converted, and become as little children, ye 
shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." It is 
the personal element, he seems to say, which gives 
religion its life and sweetness ; until you learn to trust 
arid love the person of him in whom all goodness 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 2 1 9 

centres, until you love God more than his gifts, until 
you are children again, there is no kingdom of heaven 
for you. 

How this runs through the New Testament! What 
a joy and elasticity, what a freshness characterizes the 
experience of those early Christians ! — their brightness 
and buoyancy, their inextinguishable hope, are at once 
our delight and our despair. But we need not despair; 
their secret is an open one. It is their personal, child- 
like loyalty to Jesus which gives them joy and elasti- 
city: they are bright because always looking unto 
him. It is surprising to find how much the New Tes- 
tament gives its duties this personal leverage. " Re- 
member," says Jesus to the disciples when he prepares 
them to expect trial and distress, " remember the word 
that I said unto you." Well, what is it that is to for- 
tify them? — the pride of manhood; the conviction that 
they suffered for truth's sake, the hope of reward ? No, 
none of these things, but the thought that Jesus had 
suffered the same before them: " The servant is not 
greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted me, 
they will persecute you." It is an appeal to their loy- 
alty, pure and simple. And how they answered to it. 
Remember how the Apostles went out from the 
scourging at the council at Jerusalem, rejoicing that 
they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his 
name ; recall how Saint Peter asked to be crucified 
head downward, counting himself unworthy to die 
like his Master. But in none did the flame of this de- 
votion burn brighter than in the great philosopher 



220 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

among the Apostles. Saint Paul was no mere servant 
of duty. He talks sometimes of doing things for con- 
science's sake, but the fire of his life is kindled by a 
personal touch. Abstract, logical, metaphysical as he 
is in reasoning, how inevitably in all the practical parts, 
in his very thought of life, he takes the child's attitude 
of loyalty to a person. When he writes to the whim- 
sical, arrogant Corinthians that he is their servant — 
and what a hard thing it must have been for the high- 
minded Apostle to bend his neck to the yoke of their 
humors — he tells them it is for Christ's sake. He says 
he takes pleasure in his distresses, even, for Christ's 
sake. He tells the brethren at Caesarea, when they 
forebode the danger he incurs in going to Jerusalem, 
that he is ready to die there — not for the truth, not for 
a principle — no, but for truth living and lovable in a 
personal Saviour, "for the name of the Lord Jesus!' 

Let us learn, then, to be looking more steadily 
unto Jesus. Sum up in your mind, now, what a 
deeper loyalty to him will give. 

First. It will infuse a warmer life into our religious 
experience. It will take out of our daily tasks the 
dryness and abstractness of mere duty-doing. We 
shall feel a companionship along the dusty way : the 
touch of a hand will be on us. Everything will be 
direct to Christ or from Christ. The presence of the 
great, near Friend will enable us to extract a blessed- 
ness even from the hard, repulsive things of life. 
What wearisome, disagreeable services in themselves 
does a mother's duty impose? — but the touch of the 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 221 

little hand, the tone of the quivering voice, the inde- 
scribable sense of the child's presence, appeals to 
something in her heart, which makes even the hard 
things blessed to do. Loyalty to Christ can bring 
just such a presence and blessedness to the hard 
duties in our path. How hard it is often to con- 
tribute to a charitable corporation, good though we 
know its object to be, and confident though we are of 
the wisdom of its management; but how easy, how 
delightful, to spend, to deny ourselves, to relieve a 
suffering wife, a wasting child ! What we need then for 
powerful right living, is to live not for an organization, 
a church, a body of truth, a creed, for a dim, far-off 
duty, but for a friend, a master, a brother, the glorious 
Son of man, so near us, so bound to us, so one with 
us. It is this that gives compensation to life as it 
goes, so that Christian living repays itself in its daily 
consciousness of Christ's fellowship and smile. This 
was what Saint Paul meant when he said, " For me to 
live is Christ." Every daily duty was a service done 
for a present friend ; every pain borne was a compan- 
ionship with the suffering elder brother, every sacrifice 
made was for a leader who had just asked it. What 
a fullness and richness did this give to common life ! 
This is to restore religion to its natural relations ; to 
have it sweet because it flows through its true chan- 
nels. For the sweetness of life, what makes it? Not 
physical comforts, not success and activity even; 
these are its subtance, but the flavor and richness of 
all, the delight of the senses, the pleasure of activities, 



222 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the rapture of achievement, all depend at last on per- 
sonal relations ; on the affections of the heart. These 
extinguished, the best of life dies; these in vigor, with 
parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, 
friend and companion, meeting us, cheering us on, 
sharing our joys and sorrows — and life, although poor 
and cut down, still keeps its flavor and sweetness. 
Make', then, your religion natural ; let it be the out- 
come of loyalty to a personal friend ; let it flow from 
this perennial spring. Let it look unto Jesus. 

Secondly. It will give us a larger sympathy. There 
is nothing, it seems to me, more dreadful in the aspect 
of our common life than the hardness which is engen- 
dered by competition. Especially is this true in great 
cities. The spectacle of the rushing crowd, jostling, 
grasping, trampling down the weak, forgetting the 
poor wretches that are overborne in the crush, is more 
cruel than the fierceness of the beasts of the wilder- 
ness and the jungle; for those are savage only when 
hunger compels, but the rivalry and struggle of men 
live on and grow fiercer when the appetites are all 
appeased. It is the lust to be first, to climb higher 
whoever is trodden down. 

Thirdly. But let us turn from these uncongenial pros- 
pects to the great future, which by its outlook dwarfs 
all our present triumphs and failures. Loyalty to Jesus 
opens to us such a future. It is by " looking unto 
Jesus" that we begin to see clearly how great and rich 
this future is. Our anticipation of the future life, of 
heavenly rewards, apart from this personal relation to 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 223 

Christ, are but vague and cold : all descriptions of the 
glory to come strike on the ear as a foreign speech; 
it is a life too separate from this. But if we are living 
the life of personal loyalty to Jesus, then this future is 
rich with meaning; it is fraught with possibilities so 
allied to present realities that our hearts throb to 
think of what is to come. For loyalty is a thing of 
decrees: it ranges from the first low flutter of the 
heart toward a dimly- conceived, faintly-seen form of 
loveliness, to the glorious vision of the blessed Son of 
God, which made the Apostle fall overwhelmed on the 
isle of Patmos. It begins with many of us in a vision 
of One seen in a mist. We see Jesus as the blind 
man first saw his fellows as trees walking: we see 
him as the disciples beheld him on the lake, a dim, 
ghostly figure, which stirred as much awe as love. 
Perhaps we go on for a long time doing our duty, 
praying our prayer, trying to serve a Master of whom 
we have only caught a glimpse. One of the best men 
I ever knew told me that for years he lived on trying 
to do his duty, and following in the path of Christ, 
without ever really seeing him, or having any personal 
feeling to him at all. Christ to him was only a name 
for the best goodness, the supremest excellence and 
claim on him : but to that name he was loyal. That 
was loyalty in its weakest form, devotion to an ab- 
stract ideal. But that grew. At last he of whom I 
speak fell sick; the strength with which he had been 
pressing on in a path after an unseen, unloved Leader, 
failed him. He lay helpless. And then to the weak 



224 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

heart, too feeble to resolve any more, too helpless to 
do, the vision of him who had been followed in the 
dark shone out ; and he knew what it was to see 
Jesus, and to feel his personal drawing. So it may be 
to some of us ; our loyalty is poor and faint, it comes 
and goes ; now the vision of the great Friend is clear 
and winning, and then it fades. But we know what it 
is to have this devotion flame up and impel us for a 
few steps. That may tell us what it will be to come 
nearer. For this devotion to Christ will grow as it 
goes. The felt presence will be more constantly with 
us ; the approval will fall more abidingly like sunlight 
on the heart; the form will be nearer, and the beauty 
clearer. It was this that Saint Paul meant when after 
recounting his sacrifices and struggles he says, "This 
I do, this I bear, that I may know Christy What, after 
so many years did he not know his Master? was not 
the vision ever before him ? Surely ; but what it 
had grown to be only showed him what it might yet 
go on to be. The glory and beauty of his past and 
present knowledge of Christ were only a prophecy of 
what he should see in him when he came nearer. And 
so he counted all life's treasures as so many poor 
counters to be paid down for the privilege of coming 
closer to this great, dear Friend. And then, when he 
had spent all the riches of life, and he had come to 
the last years, and now he can come no nearer this 
dear Lord, he can get no clearer vision, feel no closer 
union because of the chasm of the grave that yawns 
between, then he lon^s to die : " I have a desire to de- 



LOOKING UNTO JESUS. 225 

part," he cries. What for? Is not life rich? Is it not 
full of opportunites of service? And he answers not 
that he is tired of life here, that there is no more to do 
or to bear; but this life now is only walking along 
the side of this separating chasm — that let him go on 
here as he will, he gets no nearer his one desire. No, 
he must die to come closer; and so he has a desire to 
depart that he may be with Christ, which is far better. 
We are like the disciples in the boat on the lake in 
the mist of the morning. Dimly we see a form on 
the shore: it beckons, it calls, but we hardly know 
it; though we answer back its call, and obey its com- 
mand. We are doing duty, we are following con- 
science ; we are trying to keep Jesus' words, though 
we hardly can see him, though we do not know him 
for himself. But, suddenly we recognize who it is, 
though even then we cannot make out the features ; 
it is still a form in the mist. But we press on toward 
him, some ardently plunging into the sea, some toiling 
in rowing to reach him; and as we go, he grows 
clearer through the mist; his form becomes distinct; 
his features grow into familiarity, we can see the smile 
of welcome, we can catch the low inflection of mean- 
ing in his voice. An ! then at last we come out on 
the shore; he meets us, he leads us to the feast spread. 
We have him close and near, and all else is forgotten. 
We have looked unto Jesus until we need strain our 
eyes no more. He is with us, in us, and we with him 
forever. 
i5 



EXTRACTS 



ST, PAUL'S LOVE FOR MEN, 

In the ninth chapter of Romans the apostle Paul 
uses these remarkable words: "I could wish that 
myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, 
my kinsman according to the flesh." Why does the 
apostle value men so highly ? Because he loves them. 
Love is the penetrating vision that discovers the value 
that is hidden in common things. It is the golden 
light falling from heaven on coarse weeds and com- 
mon clay, and bringing out their glorious colors. Is 
there anything in the universe so precious to the 
mother as the very common child on which her heart 
fixes? What ordinary people, what commonplace 
boys and girls, are transfigured by this glory of love. 
Love lends a precious seeing to the eye. We are right 
when we see this preciousness in those that are near 
to us ; but we are wrong when we limit it, and find only 
commonness in ordinary men and women. The com- 
monness is in us : the dullness is in our dim unloving 
eyes ; as if a man should pick up a rough diamond in 
the dusk of evening and take it for only a common 
(226) 



ST. PAUL'S LOVE FOR MEN. 227 

pebble. Ah, brethren, if we had learned the deepest 
lesson of our holy faith, the lesson of love, the com- 
monness and dullness of life would be gone forever; 
men and women would everywhere be wonderful, inter- 
esting. There would be no tameness in that human life 
whose sublime mysteries love had revealed. It was so 
with the Apostle Paul : love for men had given him the 
keenest interest in every thing human ; all men had a 
charm for him, rich and poor, wise and foolish, philoso- 
phers at Athens and rude mountaineers at Iconium, 
heathen poets, Roman soldiers — all attracted him, and 
the charm of each was that he was a man. His love 
pierced to the inner world of -each soul, behind every 
disguise, and found wonders there. That world of 
men, which others sneered at and yawned over as dull 
and common, he entered as Aladdin entered the vault 
of gems: he found riches on every side; life blazed 
with the light of jewels : men that were capable of 
eternal blessedness, who had on them the stamp of 
God; and the thought that they might fail cf their 
destiny, that this treasure might be spilled into the 
fathomless sea of eternity and be lost, that these 
jewels of souls might be uncrystallized and crumble 
back into nothingness, was too much for him: "I 
could wish that I was accursed from Christ for them." 
This was the central thought in Paul's mind, the mas- 
ter-vision, in the light of which he saw everything — 
the vision of human nature redeemed and purified and 
perfected in Christ. It is because he has had a view 
of what a human soul can be, of the depths and 



228 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

heights of goodness, of blessedness which Christ can 
unfold in a saved man, that he has this passionate 
longing for the rescue of his countrymen. So the loss 
of a soul deepened, and blackened, and grew tragic 
beneath his gaze, with all the misery not only of a 
great suffering, but of a great extinction. " This it is 
to be saved," he seems to say — it is to know Christ; it 
is to be new made, to go back to youth, to the youth of 
Paradise, to be filled with all the fullness of God, to be 
a partaker of the divine nature ; it is to share the great- 
ness and blessedness that are God's. And so, looking 
out on the infinite, overwhelming prospect of life and 
glory that might be, and then seeing what men - were, 
and foreseeing what they were going down to be, 
stupid, selfish, narrowing, growing poorer, going out 
into darkness, to eternal death, he is seized with an 
infinite pity. It was because he knew from his own 
experience what Christ was, that he longed for others 
to be made Christian. 



THE SPIRIT OF GOD, 



It was the Spirit of God, we are expressly told in 
the Scriptures, that gave to Samson his great strength. 
If so, that strength was no common gift ; it was sacred ; 
and so we see it was by the use God made of it; for 
Samson was called to a high office, that of judge over 
Israel. He was called up for a peculiar crisis; and he 
had his gift, his peculiar gift, suited to the times. God 



THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 229 

seemed to say to Israel in every great act of Samson : 
" Do you see what one man may be who has the Spirit? 
So shall it be with your whole people, when you, like 
Samson, are separate, consecrated, and possessed by the 
Lord." 

Now in view of this I sav that Samson's crift, although 
apparently so low, was really sacred. It was just the gift 
Israel needed, for it was the gift they could best under- 
stand. That strength was holy and to be revered be- 
cause it was the manifestation of the Spirit of God, and 
because it was bestowed for the purpose of saving God's 
people. It was indeed a sacred trust, a holy indwell- 
ing, and Samson's sin was his contempt for, or rather 
his irreverent use and holding of his gift. For what 
he did was to act as if that great strength was his own 
to do what he would with. All his conference with 
Delilah about it was a sort of trifling with his gift. It 
was an irreverent handling of sacred things. It was 
treating God's Spirit and his work as if they belonged 
to him, and were not a sacred trust to be held for God 
and to be used for him. 

Now there is a deep lesson here for us. For what 
makes men strong to do their duty in life? What 
makes us vigorous to serve God and our generation? 
The same that made Samson strong for his work in 
Israel ; the Holy Spirit of God. It is he that indites 
those prayers we daily offer; it is his touch that re- 
strains us from sin, that teaches us what is good, that 
moves us toward God. It is he that forms Christ, is 
forming him in us daily by little duties done, by the 



23O SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK 

constant round of daily service. And our special gifts 
for serving God are his work and indwelling. I do 
not mean the gifts that fit us for secular life ; health, 
means, skill, courage; but the religious gifts in us, our 
graces and virtues. One has a meek spirit, another 
strong faith, another love and gentleness ; and all these 
are the motions of the Holy Ghost. We are apt to 
forget this. We think our virtues, our views of truth, 
our gifts of prayer, of speech, of courage, are our own. 
And so we use them ; we are led to trifle with them 
just as if they were like any common things. We do 
not feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in them. And 
this is the great sin of many Christians, They go 
where society makes a joke of religious things, they 
allow companions to rally them about their religious 
life. They think they can let religion and religious 
gifts be made light of, because it is their experience, 
their doings that are discussed. But it cannot be. If 
you are truly religious, if your work and life is for 
Christ at all, it is the Spirit of the Lord that is on you, 
and it is a grievous sin for you to trifle with him. 
When you have allowed that, you are like Samson in 
Delilah's lap. You go backto your closet and your 
Christian life and work, whatever it may be, thinking, 
perhaps, that all is as before; your trifling was only a 
joke. So Samson when he awoke out of his sleep 
said, I will go out as at other times before; but "he 
wist not that the Lord was departed from him." 

For we must remember that when the Spirit of the 
Lord draws away from a man, he does so silently. 



THE SPIRIT OF GOD. 23 1 

God did not thunder in Samson's ears whilst he was 
playing with Delilah, saying, "Beware!" No, he let 
him alone. This seems unreasonable, hard and un- 
just to you. You think you should have some warn- 
ing, so that you might detain the Spirit. But our 
ways are not as God's ways. The Spirit of the Lord 
comes and goes silently, because its work is spiritual 
and manifests itself only by its effects. " He shall 
glorify me," says Christ. And how? As the wind 
blows ; you hear the sound, you see the effects, but 
not the wind. You have a view of Christ : in reading 
the Bible, or hearing a sermon or thinking of our 
Lord, you see something newly beautiful and precious 
in him. You are drawn to him; melted, cheered, re- 
buked. And you think it is the great sermon, or 
the good book, or the passage of Scripture; but 
really it was the Spirit who receives the things of 
Christ and shows them to us. We are constantly 
moved by the Spirit, but we recognize him not. We 
see the pictures, but the painter is invisible. We hear 
the music, but see no trace of the musician. 

So he departs. As we were under his influence and 
knew it not, so we pass away from under his touch. 
We only know that religion is a little duller than it 
used to be, that we are growing tired of church, and 
sermons and the Bible. 

How then shall you prevent his flight. By doing 
just what Samson did not do. By recognizing every 
good thought, every pious feeling, every longing for 
salvation — everything in your religious life as his gift. 



232 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

PURPOSE IN LIFE, 



To many life is but a succession of days, duties 
and enjoyments, not bound together with a plan, a 
purpose. To all such, life is dull, poor, fruitless, dis- 
tracted 5 it is a bundle of sticks falling apart. The 
lesson of Christ's life is saying to them "seek a 
plan !■'■ Even a child may have such a path marked 
out before it; and every day maybe an advance along 
that path ; he may be saying each day, " What shall I 
do to amuse myself to-day, to have a good time; 
where shall I get a new plaything?" or he may say, 
" To-day I am to obey the best I can, to learn my les- 
son as well as possible;" and then that child has got 
something of the movement, the independence, the 
joyful earnestness, of Christ's great life. Even a sick 
one may bring something of the current of Christ's 
life into the dull weariness of the sick-room, by saying, 
" Let me be more cheerful and patient and bright for 
my fellow-men than yesterday." 

But if we would have the movement, the directness, 
the independence of Christ's life, we must have his 
conviction of having gotten our work, our purpose in 
life, from God, and not have chosen it for ourselves. 
It is God's providence which puts us into our true 
work. And when a man has settled down to the one 
aim of life, when he has got his course, he has with it, 
if he be a Christian, a deep sense that God has given 
him his work. This is clear to him, although he may 
not be able to show it to others. 



PURPOSE IN LIFE. 233 

How we are to find out the work which God has 
for us to do, is a personal question between ourselves 
and God. Only the most general directions can be 
given. To find the work he has for us we must be 
simple in our aims, unselfish, desirous to know the 
truth, willing to be led of God. Men make mistakes 
most generally because they are double-minded — they 
would look at God and at the world too, and so they 
see nothing clearly. 

The directions of God as to our purpose and path 
in life are to be sought in no mysterious, miraculous 
way, but under the conviction that the closing and 
opening of paths to us in life are providential; that 
God means something bv the ordering 1 of the circum- 
stances of our lives. This is a plain, homely, old- 
fashioned and most sensible guide to our work in life. 
With the single eye, with minute and particular prayer 
for direction, look and see what God's providence 
points you to. And how simple, how unmistakable 
the lines of those providences in their great bearings 
are. Providence has put you, for instance, in a home ; 
you have ties of flesh and blood, father and mother, 
brother and sister, friends, social surroundings; they 
were all set for you before you came, and there is one 
line of direction fixed for you. It can never be right 
to refuse these duties ; something for life is set you to 
do just by these relations. 

But now, when men think of their life-work, how 
few think that God has set them any direction in the 
home, in the church of their birth and heritage. 



234 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

What wonder that men go drifting across the sea 
when they begin by shutting their eyes to every indi- 
cation that God's homely providence has marked for 
them. We are all too much set on choosing our duties 
and too little ready to believe that God has already 
chosen them for us. But no life can have the true 
movement of advance, of independence, of self-poise, 
which does not feel the propulsion of the Divine direc- 
tion. I do not know what is greater than to feel in 
our hearts' core this sense of a Divine sending in our 
lives ; to be able to say as we look along our life's 
path, as Christ did, " Let me go to the next * * * for 
therefore am I sent." I am sent: I have not chosen 
for myself; God has chosen for me, and I am only 
living to do his bidding. Can you say that ? Have 
you been sent? Is your work and purpose in life of 
your own devising ; or did God give it to you ? 

It is a humble way of life to have God choose for us. 
If we could choose, we should always choose great 
and shining things. But God knows best; and if 
once we can know that our path is given by him, then 
come the greatness and joy that always come with 
the clear doing of God's will; then we have a life like 
Christ's, a life like a strong stream, ever moving, ever 
widening, never ceasing until it finds the eternal sea. 



LETTING RELIGION SLIP. 235 

LETTING RELIGION SLIP. 



In mature life men are prone to let the precious 
things of religion slip, through the growing dullness 
that comes from habit. We let slip what we have 
grown used to. The things we have heard slip away 
because we have heard them so often. The story of 
the cross, like any other story, wears out its first sur- 
face interest by being listened to over and over again. 
I do not know why we should expect this universal 
law of habit to be suspended here. To go on hearing 
the same thing over and over is to end in not hearing 
it at all, but only a sound of words. It is so in every- 
thing. And there is nothing magical in the words of 
Scripture, in the doctrines of religion, in the hymns 
we sing, in our forms of devotion, that they should rtot 
grow dull, too, by repeated going over and over. 
How trite and familiar seem the gospel lessons some- 
times! The descriptions of heaven, the hymns of 
faith, the precepts of daily duty, even the words of 
Christ, how pallid they show at times ! Is it that the 
gospel is really wearing out? No, it is but an inti- 
mation that we are letting slip the things we have 
heard. We are losing our hold on them; and they 
their hold on us, because we are only going over and 
over the same ground. They do not move us, they 
have no thrill of life, because they are old to us; and 
they are old because we have ceased to grow. We 
are holding our faith as a fixed thing: our devotion, 
our aspiration, all are completed. " Take heed !" You 



236 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

cannot feel that the Gospel is old, that worship has 
grown threadbare, and not be in danger of letting 
these things slip. The dull grasp of what is custom- 
ary, the flatness of the trite, these are only the signs 
of a failing grasp. Unless the things of the kingdom 
of God grow deeper, unless praise and prayer and 
devout thought grow richer, they are slipping from 
you and growing less. Let not familiarity rob you of 
the power of religion. 

But how, you ask, may we keep that which is so 
old, ever fresh ? It is by life. Life is change, growth, 
the passing on and up, the deepening and widening of 
experience and character; not the throwing away of 
the past, but the carrying of it into a fuller, richer 
future. The bud is not cast off when the flower 
blooms, but only taken up and expanded. The child 
is in the man, the struggling disciple is all there in 
the ripened saint. We must go on from the bud to 
the blossom, from the blossom to the fruit. We must 
go on to perfection; for going on to perfection is only 
carrying out in life what we know as truth and accept 
as the ideal of life. Doctrine is made perfect in life. 
To know truth is one thing; to accept it is another; 
to have it transformed in us into character by living 
it is still another — and that is perfection. 

For example, to know the love for Christ which the 
Apostle Paul describes as full of joy, simply as a feel- 
ing, a glow suffusing the soul, is one thing, and a very 
precious thing. But that is only the seed, the flush 
of the bloom. If we would keep it, we must go on to 



LETTING RELIGION SLIP. 237 

perfection, i. e. we must carry it into life, embody it in 
the common acts and duties of every day's experience. 
This Christ has shown us how to do: "If ye keep my 
commandments, ye shall abide in my love." To give 
up our wills to him ; to sacrifice our ease at his word; 
to soften the harsh word; to deny the self-indulgent 
wish; to put ourselves aside for others: all this is to 
go on to perfection. This is to keep adding to what 
we have. 

Or again, there are passages in the gospels that fall 
on our minds like the mother's cradle-song on the 
fretful, angry child ; as we listen they seem to charm 
away our mean thoughts, our hardness, our selfish 
passions. We say, " Oh, that I were such ! " That is 
the rousing in us by God's Spirit of the hunger for 
righteousness which Christ blessed. But to keep this 
vision of the beauty of goodness, to feel this hunger 
ever pressing us on, to make it perfect, there is but 
one way — to translate it into life ; at first imperfectly, 
rudely; but to go on, seeking truth in the inward 
parts, struggling to resist the unhallowed thought, to 
give up and submit to wrong rather than to do wrong, 
this is to make the outwardly beautiful an inward 
beauty, to carry the vision of Christ's loveliness into 
our own hearts. This is the remedy that lies in life — 
in strenuous endeavor. This is the earthly side. By 
itself alone it is barren. No man can use it unless he 
feels that God is working in him to will and to do. 

We must look up to God, "that we may obtain 
grace to help." We must pray. 



238 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Work and prayer, then, are the two oars by which 
we drive toward heaven. Either one alone is useless. 
The monk's ideal of religion — to pray and meditate, 
to meditate and pray — this is to pull at one oar, and 
go round and round in a fruitless circle. The modern 
superficial idea of religion — to be always at work, busy 
here, busy there, living outward and by our own en- 
deavor — this is to pull the other oar, and to repeat 
the idle round, only in another direction. But to lay 
hold of both — to pray as though God must do all, and 
to work as though we must do all — this is to make 
progress; this is to keep what we have by getting 
more. This is to pursue the ideal of the perfect man 
in Christ Jesus, that like all ideals grows grander and 
deeper as we go toward it. 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF CHRIST'S SUFFERINGS. 



The phrase is not a vague bit of sentiment; it is an 
expression of Scripture. Saint Paul uses it; when he 
speaks of giving up all for Christ, making a complete 
surrender of his inmost self, he says it is that he may 
know among other things, " the fellowship of Christ's 
sufferings." That is, that in the sufferings he has to 
endure he may be made one with Christ. Not to suffer 
alone in sullen submission; not to suffer bravely even 
as a stoic, wrapping himself in his pride of manhood; 
but even in pain of body, in the pang of loneliness and 
bereavement, in the misery of disappointment and weak- 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF CHRIST S SUFFERINGS. 239 

ness, feeling a fellowship with his Saviour, finding a 
sweetness in this, that he shares his anguish with the 
great Sufferer, that together they are walking through 
the furnace, that in a strange mysterious identity of 
sorrow, God is working through them towards his 
kingdom of righteousness. What a thought is that 
to light up the hour of anguish ! Now there is comfort 
in the simple sense of companionship in suffering, 
springing not from envy or selfish pleasure in the 
knowledge that others are no happier than ourselves, 
but from the human craving for sympathy. It is the 
dim sense of comfort striking through pain, that we 
are not alone, that we are not shut out from fellow- 
ship. And this sense of fellowship in suffering may 
rise to a height of nobleness when we fall in with suf- 
ferers that are bearing their anguish with patience, with 
meekness, with cheerfulness, and for a great cause. 

What shall be said, then, of the fellowship in pain we 
have with our Saviour! He, the Highest, has bowed 
himself to pass under the yoke of our sorrows : " It 
behooved him to be made like unto his brethren in all 
things;'' yes, in suffering even, that he might be able to 
succor them that are tried. Not by compulsion, not for 
himself, but freely and for us, that we might have the 
fellowship of God in anguish and agony. " He tasted 
death" with us and for us. It is a comfort and a joy 
to know this. If you have not felt it, be assured you 
have not sounded the depths of God's comfort, you 
know not all the meanings of the cross. But you may 
know it : it is for you. Go, then, with your pain of 



24O SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

heart, and seek this suffering Saviour; seek his cross; 
lay your sorrows by his ; learn what it is to know " the 
fellowship of his sufferings." Learn how the heartache 
lessens and loses its pang at the cross. 

And then, too, Christ's sufferings are an explanation 
of our sufferings. To feel that we suffer with him is 
to a certain extent to have a clearing up of the mys- 
tery of suffering. It may not explain it entirely. 
What can? There is a mystery about pain before 
which all philosophy is dumb. To look at a little 
child that has never known good or ill ; to see it toss 
in agony; to hear it moan; to see it look at its mother, 
with the dumb entreaty in it for relief, with the won- 
der in it that she will not help — who has known this, 
and not felt himself on a shoreless sea of mystery ? 
One sting of suffering — one of its keenest stings- — is 
the darkness that gathers round it. "Why, oh, why?" 
goes up the wail of the stricken mother by the new- 
made grave ; and there is no answer. In the cham- 
bers where the sick lie for years on a ceaseless rack 
of pain, we stand by and we cry out to ourselves and 
God, " Why, O God, why? " Now we are to seek for 
explanation at the cross. We read there that this law 
of suffering is a vast and high law. Pain is not an ac- 
cident — a mischievous intruder, breaking over the wall 
in this province of God's kingdom, and wreaking 
its malice on poor, weak, insignificant creatures here 
and there: no, it is for all. This law reaches from the 
Creator on his throne to the worm that writhes in the 
dust. "The whole creation eroaneth and travaileth 



THE FELLOWSHIP OF CHRIST S SUFFERINGS. 24 1 

in pain until now." Even he, " the brightness of the 
Father's glory, and the express image of his person," 
"learned obedience by the things which he suffered." 
Wonderful revelation of the universality of suffering ! 
Its dark stain and shroud of mystery rest upon and en- 
compass even the throne of the Highest. Not even 
in heaven is the memorial of it lost. John tells us that 
when he looked through the open door into heaven 
and saw the throne set, " Lo, in the midst of the throne 
stood a Lamb as it had been slain." Yes, the image 
of suffering is enthroned in the midst of the adoring 
elders, the ranks of bright seraphim and cherubim. 
And this is as far as it goes an explanation of suffer- 
ing. I do not pronounce it a full explanation ; it only 
moves the mystery a little farther off. When we say 
that suffering is a vast, wide law — a law of the uni- 
verse — we still leave a mystery; but it is the mystery 
of the universe, the mystery of Being. 

The fellowship of our suffering, then, is with the 
greatest, the Highest of sufferers, with the Head of 
the universe. In suffering with Christ we suffer 
under a vast, all-comprehending law. When he cries 
"trouble is near; there is none to help," his wail 
expresses what the whole creation feels. And when 
we see this, when we come into this august compan- 
ionship of suffering is it not easier to say: "Even so, 
Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight ?" This 
fellowship of suffering unites us with Christ. It con- 
stitutes a veritable bond of union and communion. 
We not only suffer as Christ, but with Christ, so that 
16 



242 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

we go through a common experience; and in our suf- 
fering we become identified with him. This, too, is a 
mystery; but it is a fact. How pain unites men! The 
soldiers that have marched and stood watch together; 
that have lain wounded side by side, and shared a 
common prison — the sailors that have buffeted the 
seas, and suffered shipwreck and famine together — 
are not these companions ever after as no joys shared 
could have made them fellows ? Yes, there is a weld- 
ing under the strokes of affliction that knits heart to 
heart; as the iron on the anvil beaten and crushed 
grows to its fellow iron one bar of steel, so hearts 
under the blows of misery grow one : this is the fellow- 
ship of suffering. " I bear in my body," says Paul, 
" the marks of the Lord Jesus :" blows of the scourge, 
wounds of stoning, the galling of the prison chain — 
marks of his suffering for Christ — yes, of his suffering 
with Christ; for he calls these the marks of Christ 
himself, as though he and his Master had been made 
one in the sharp hours of anguish that these witnessed. 
Oh, fellowship of the hour of pain, when the flesh 
fainted and the heart failed, has there not come to us 
in that loss when so much of life was torn from us, an 
approach to the mind and heart of Christ, such as no 
happy experience had ever given ? " I" says Paul, " am 
crucified with Christ," and so made dead to the world 
and alive to the indwelling Saviour — dead ? yes ; — but 
what anguish is it so to die ! And yet who knows all 
the meaning of the cross till it is planted in his own 
heart? Who knows the full union of the life with 



WORSHIP. 243 

Christ till he has known " the fellowship of the suffer- 
ings of Christ?" 



WORSHIP.* 

What is the great business of the soul with God? 
You can think of much, of religion as we know it, here 
that will be left behind when we go out into eternity, 
just as the husk and shell drop from the ripening fruit. 
How many duties, labors, ordinances, will fall off with 
the stripping of death ! But one great part will remain : 
we will worship and adore, we will trust and praise, 
there as here. Heaven as St. John saw it in his vision 
is full of worship. By many the importance of wor- 
ship in God's eyes is forgotten : " Only live right," they 
say, " and you need not trouble yourself about devotion/' 
But it is clear, I think, that God expects something 
more from us than merely good conduct. You say 
that you are an honest, well-behaved man, who do your 
duty to your fellow-man: — suppose you are; but 
Christ says "The Father seeketh worshippers" and 
your description of yourself does not meet that. You 
say " I will work," but God says, " I seek worship." You 
say, " I believe in duty, that is the true way to heaven," 

* This extract is from a sermon preached at the dedication of The 
Messiah Evangelical Lutheran Church in the city of Philadelphia, April 
27th, 1879, on tne text from John iv: 23. This church had in its in- 
fancy been under the pastoral care of the Rev. Theophilus Stork, D. D., 
the father, and hence the son had been requested to preach the dedi- 
cation sermon upon the completion of the church building. 



244 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

but in heaven they are absorbed in devotion. Poor 
soul, struggling to the right with no inspiration but 
your own purpose ! What a dreary path is the path of 
duty with no vision of God in it ! 

But it is precisely because men do not look up to 
God that it seems easy to them to fulfill the standard 
of right living. They lose sight of the true goodness, 
and then their motives of goodness dwindle, and they 
are satisfied with a poor, narrow ideal of life. The 
poor mechanical artist goes on making his pictures in 
his dingy garret, painting from some dull sketch, and he 
thinks he does well enough, till one day he takes his 
work out into the fields and sees it against the blaze of 
the sky and the loveliness of hill and dale, and then 
how wretched it all is ! So men look down on their 
earthly path and plod on, honest, they think, and true, 
and really meritorious ; but if only they had one hour 
of worship — if they but looked up and saw the glory 
of God to praise him, could they talk of their good 
conduct? "Now mine eye seeth thee," cried Job, 
" wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and 
ashes." We need to worship God to be ready to work 
with him. We must always be going back to see him, 
or we forget how high and bright and perfect goodness 
is. It must always be a coarser kind of conduct that 
puts worship into the background. " Prophecies, 
(preaching) shall fail, tongues, (teaching) shall cease, 
knowledge shall vanish away;" but the love that be- 
holds and adores, that communes and praises — this 
never faileth. The deepest in you is that which links 



TRUE CHRISTIAN PATIENCE. ^45 

you to God. He is the beginning and the end, the 
sweetness, and brightness, and life of all that is good. 
The frasrrance of a flower, the sweet face of a child, a 
strain of music — what a joy and brightness come from 
them to our souls ; but they only give what they have 
received from their Maker. It is his beauty and per- 
fection that breathe from them. To know God, this 
is life eternal. To behold him, to worship him — this 
is heaven. 



TRUE CHRISTIAN PATIENCE. 



Patience in a Christian is not mere endurance. It 
is not simply taking pain and setting our teeth, and 
saying, "It can't be helped, I must just bear it!" 
That is merely a passive state of mind — it is simply 
the soul coiling itself up in itself, and trying not to 
feel ; or, if it does feel, not to cry out. But passive 
endurance is not the true godly patience — a grace of 
the Holy Spirit. 

Take bodily pain, for instance, that great trial of the 
soul, one of the greatest of trials when long continued. 
What is patience under that? Is it simply not to cry 
out, not to blaspheme or blame God? No ; but under 
it still to praise God, to go on thanking him, obeying 
him, doing our daily duty as far as we are able. 
There is a positive side to patience under suffering — ■ 
and that positive side is what makes it Christian, 
spiritual. Such a Christian patience is a great devel- 



246 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

oping- force in character. Simply to lie still and do 
nothing, to empty ourselves of feeling, thought, activ- 
ity — and that is what many people understand by 
patience under affliction — develops nothing: that is 
death; it is healing pain by narcotizing the soul. The 
patience of some people is nothing but a sort of spirit- 
ual opium. The more they have of it the weaker the 
soul gets. By saying to themselves "be still;" by 
suppressing thought and emotion, by numbing them- 
selves, they gradually sink below their suffering; but 
that can never be the end of God's dealing. His way 
is to have us rise above, not sink below, our pain. 
And an active patience, so to call it, does that. It 
meets the force of suffering by another force and over- 
comes it. And that force is faith: "This is the vic- 
tory that overcometh the world," says the Apostle, 
" even our faith." Misery, anguish, the sharp blows 
that sever us from our joys and comforts, these have 
in them the tempting power of the world. Job's wife 
speaks the mind of the world when she comes to her 
husband in the hour of darkness with her bitter de- 
spair : " Curse God and die." That is the voice of 
the world. How potent it is! And that is to be re- 
sisted — to be met face to face and overcome by faith. 
This is the triumph of patience, of an active patience, 
that endures because it sees the Invisible. 

But it does not triumph without a struggle. The 
book of Job is a record of such a struggle. Job comes 
forth from the conflict by a sheer lift of faith and is 
resigned, not because he understands God's way, not 



THE SCRIPTURAL VIEW OF HEAVEN. 247 

because he has grown numb to his pain, but simply 
because he commits all to God. And out of such a 
struggle, what inward strength rises in the soul ! 



THE SCRIPTURAL YIEW OF HEAVEN. 



So much has been said of late about the meanness 
of encouraging ourselves with the prospect of a blessed 
hereafter that we have to go back to the Scriptures to 
refresh our sense of the reality and worthiness of the 
heavenly hope. " You ought to be brave and cheer- 
ful and dutiful without thinking about heaven," the 
philosophers tell us. " Indeed," they say, " you cannot 
be really brave and noble until you get rid of these 
sneaking hopes of future happiness, and do your duty 
just for right's sake." Now, I think, we ought always 
to be suspicious of any moral teaching which finds 
the motives to right living which Christ and his 
Apostles put forward too coarse. I do not deny the 
apparent magnanimity of the goodness which expects 
no hereafter. But this superfine unselfishness which 
dispenses with the heaven Christ reveals and is going 
to be good without any God ; what is it after all but the 
hectic flush of virtue in the consumptive — the beacon 
of fast approaching death. For surely goodness which 
has no hereafter is on its way to death. It may seem 
very noble and lofty to abjure all hope of heaven, to 
be good with no prospect but of extinction in the 



248 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

grave; but that is the beginning of moral paralysis. 
If I am only a mote in the sun-beam, a midge born in 
the morning to die at night, what does it matter 
whether I am good or not ? If there are no eternal 
consequences from my conduct, to me or to any one 
else — if character is only a hut built in the forest to 
shelter the traveler for a single night, and then left to 
decay, and not an eternal habitation — what can it really 
matter what character I have? In such an atmosphere 
the thirst for the life with God in Christ, the desire for 
the supreme goodness, must at last die away. 

It is not so the Bible speaks; the great serious 
minds there as they look on life and speak of it by the 
inspiration of God's Spirit do not disdain the hope of 
the great life beyond. St. Paul takes up the sorrows 
of life and weighs them in the scale of eternity. He 
looks across the grave, into eternity, through the gate 
of heaven; he sees the coming glory, "our light afflic- 
tion which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far 
more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." And 
again he says : " Mortality shall be swallowed up of 
life." 

That, after all, is the key to the .problem of life, 
God is the Eternal One ; he can never cease to be ; 
and his righteousness is an eternal righteousness ; it 
can never fail to be glorious and satisfying. And you, 
the child of God, have in you by your very childhood 
the seed of an eternal being; you are to live forever. 
It is not a question of your liking or disliking; the 
child of God made in his image is a child of eternity, 



THE MAIN HINDRANCE TO THE GOSPEL. 249 

and his character is an eternal thing. " He that is 
holy let him be holy still, and he which is filthy let 
him be filthy still" — these sentences echo down the 
corridors of endless being. It is in the light of eternal 
destiny, then, that the Bible shows the solemn sig- 
nificance of sin and righteousness; it is this pene- 
trating, searching light which makes all life here 
start out into such tremendous importance. 

There is no conception of life, its duties, aims, 
consolations, true to God's idea of it, which does not 
include this vision of the perfection and consummation 
of our being in heaven. The artist cannot paint to 
the height of his art without the light from the infinite 
heavens streaming on his canvas, and we cannot paint 
our life pictures but in this light of the eternal world. 



THE MAIN HINDRANCE TO THE GOSPEL 



Let us put it into one word — Earthlmess. It is the 
insensibility of the soul, its stupidity to spiritual ideas 
and influences. The Apostle sums it up when he 
says " dead in trespasses and sins." It is as if you 
.came to a man to show him a glorious landscape and 
found him blind ; or to tell him of a wonderful discov- 
ery in science or a startling event in history, and he had 
lost his mind. We talk of the difficulties skepticism 
puts in the way of religion, of the influence science 
has in unsettling men's faith ; but these to the vast 



250 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

weight of indifference, of stolid insensibility, which 
presses on men's souls, are as nothing. . . . Here is 
the real anti-Christ ; it is the carnal heart, the earthly 
temper, the callous soul that dreams of no heaven, 
hears no divine voice, looks only down on the earth 
at its feet. 

But what is meant by EartJdiness ? it may be asked. 
I think the answer is given in that picture of the mul- 
titude seeking Christ for bread : to whom he said : 
" Ye seek me not because ye saw the miracles, but 
because ye did eat of the loaves and were filled." 

What is it that is so wrong, so hopeless in them? 
Not that being hungry, they sought for bread; not 
that being poor they were anxious for a living, or that 
being weak they ran instinctively to One that was so 
strong. But that having met Christ and known him, 
nothing in them should answer to him but appetite. 
Let us recall the day's experience. They had gone 
out into the wilderness and had spent many hours 
with Jesus. He had healed their sick ; he had taught 
them spiritual truths ; he had spoken of sin and 
goodness, of God and heaven ; and at last his pity 
had ministered to their hunger. And now only one 
thing vibrates in the memory of the crowd. They 
have forgotten miracles and teaching, they only re- 
member that they were fed. As if a harp should be 
put into the hand of a player and only one low bass 
string should answer to his touch. What a ruin is 
there ! They have been tested and failed. Christ has 
come to them, and they have made their choice- — not 



Abraham's faith. 251 

goodness, not heaven, not Christ, but bread. And 
thus is earthliness, spiritual stupidity, revealed in their 
hearts. 



ABRAHAM'S FAIT}}. 



It was faith, simple unshaken faith in the Word of 
God, that made him all his life homeless yet hopeful. 
He had only God's Word, " I will bring thee unto a 
land that I will shew thee;" and so " he looked for a 
city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker 
is God." 

What a simple, childlike faith, but how sublime! 
Only a few plain words of God ; but that was enough. 
He saw the eternal city, not near, but afar off; not 
vivid and glorious, but dim and undefined. But God 
had said it, and he girds himself to go forth a pilgrim 
and a stranger on the earth. Great, heroic soul ! — 
faithful Abraham, who chose his portion above and 
beyond. He walked by faith. Oh, mighty soul, with 
the far-seeing vision of trust ; the vague, impalpable, 
elusive things of the Spirit, these were thy realities — 
not what the hand grasped, what the ear heard, what 
the eye saw; not pomps and powers, luxuries and flat- 
teries of the sense, but the solemn verities of the soul, 
of eternity, of God. This is what is meant by that 
great saying which arches over the Bible, sweeping 
like a vast bow from Genesis to Revelation, " The just 
shall live bv faith." 



252 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

When once a soul has been possessed by the 
thought of eternity — an eternity of joy or woe beyond 
the grave — and has begun to live with the eye fixed 
on that, then he is another man: He sees the schemes, 
and interests, and great absorbing engagements of life 
here as so many booths that are put up for a few days, 
but will presently be taken down. Fortunes, honors, 
ambitions, comforts — what are they ? Fire balloons 
that children send up with shouts and eager cries into 
the darkness, they burn and blaze, and then drop in 
swiftly-falling sparks, and the silent stars are left 
shining on far above in the hollow of the night. 



CHRIST'S V^LU^TION OF pN, 



Christ's interest in the humblest and the basest men 
shows us what their real worth is. Travelling along 
the old beaten way of human experience he discovers 
to us that which we could never find out for ourselves. 
As he looks upon some commonplace sinner he 
kindles into interest. Our wonder is excited; "what," 
we say, "can he see there?" And he makes us look 
with him until we see what he sees. So he stopped 
before the poor Samaritan woman with whom he talked 
at Jacob's well. What can he see in her? A soul — 
that is it; behind the dullness, the coarseness, the 
vacuity and the viciousness, an immortal soul. He 
walks through the gallery of the world and stops be- 



ABRAHAMS FAITH. 253 

fore this or that common man or woman; and suddenly 
we see what God sees ; not the station, the manners, 
the culture, the genius — these are not a soul. What 
I really am is not my present dullness or brightness, 
but what it is in me to become, the mysterious ca- 
pacity for likeness to God, the deep soil of spiritual 
being that can bear the bloom of heavenly graces, an- 
gelic affections, holy tempers. This is what really 
makes a soul. And this Christ saw. As if one should 
take up an ugly pebble and divine its heart, should 
brush off the mud and cut through the dull surface, 
until the flash shot forth, and so find a diamond. 
That is the heavenly valuation of a man. That is 
Christ's valuation of you. 

But is this real? Is there not something exagger- 
ated in such a reading of men? Will it bear the test? 
Can you make it practical? This brings up the whole 
question, on what scale are men to be measured ? If 
this world is the whole; if the grave ends all, then 
Christ's valuation of men is not a real one; it is exag- 
gerated, unpracticable. If the worth of a soul is its 
use here, what it contributes to the common stock of 
knowledge, culture, service, then the bulk of souls are 
poor, cheap things. One Joshua would outweigh a 
million Achans on that scale. 

This shows as by a lightning flash what an im- 
mense depreciation of value men would be subject to 
if once it became an article of common belief that there 
was no future life. If when a man dies that is the end 
of him, if the three-score years exhaust the soul then 



254 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

every man must be rated at what he is here and now. 
It is of no use to talk about what he might be, of the 
depths of capacity in him; there are no depths; but 
only a thin skim of intelligence and emotions that this 
one life uses up. On such a scale men would dwindle, 
that is the mass of men. They would be worth almost 
nothing, they would be only bubbles ; let them float 
down the stream and break. 

But Christ sees beyond; he justifies his deep interest 
in men by the immortality he has brought to light. 
Every human soul to his eye is something vast, im- 
measurable, because back of it lies eternity; "for the 
joy that was set before him, he endured the cross!' What 
j oy ? " That he might bring many sons to glory. ' ' Every 
poor narrow human life was to him an open portal 
through which he looked on an endless vista of blessed- 
ness or of shame. He saw all men in the light of their 
eternal being. 

What a vision, then, there is in a human soul ; what 
a gallery of pictures is folded away in each — the undy- 
ing succession, ever brightening or darkening, that is to 
come out of each petty life. This is what he sees as 
he bends over me and says u What shall a man give in 
exchange for his soul ? " 



CONSECRATION. 



To many minds consecration is a word full of a 
strange awe. It seems impossible to attach it to the 
common every-day world. It suggests an abandon- 



CONSECRATION. 255 

ment of all that is usual, a solitary experience. It is a 
going out from among men into the desert to be alone 
with God. It means shutting up the store, bidding 
farewell to society, turning one's back on politics. But 
I am sure all this comes from a wrong idea of what 
holiness really is; as if it were shut up to certain 
specific acts. We are hardly escaped out of the primer 
of Judaism where the childish mind of the race was 
taught the deep idea of holiness by having it attached 
to certain places, persons, animals, vessels. But even 
Judaism might teach us that it is not the thing, the 
occupation, that makes holy ; but the fact that it is given 
to God. 

The priest was told to make a certain ointment, 
and that was holy ; he who used it for common pur- 
poses was to be cut off, the same as though he had 
blasphemed God's name. What did that teach ? Why 
that the commonest thing, an apothecary's oil, the 
making of it, the use of it, could be an act of conse- 
cration as pure as the service and sacrifice in the tab- 
ernacle. It was not the oil that was holy ; it was its 
dedication to God's service. And whatsoever you 
give to God — your laughter and tears, your soothing 
of a child's grief, your manly struggle to provide for 
your family, your cheerfulness under trial — all, all is 
spiritual, holy, consecrated. 

There are those who shrink from having religion 
extend too far. They are willing to be religious up to 
a certain point. The Sabbath, the church, the closet, 
the time of Lent, the sacramental season — these are 



256 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

for God; but eating and drinking, going on a journey, 
voting at the polls, selling calico, going into society— 
these are for me. And when the presence of God, the 
idea of consecration, is brought in there, it is felt to be 
an intrusion. We want religion to be to us as the 
stately cathedral, the secluded cell, the meeting for 
prayer; not as the atmosphere that enfolds all. Many 
a man who will go cheerfully to church, take the 
sacrament, say grace at table, and even pray in public, 
stops short when he hears of carrying his devotion to 
God down to his office, out into the market, off into 
the fields, up on the bench. " This is too much : busi- 
ness is one thing, religion another; politics is one 
thing, serving God quite another ; society is one thing, 
consecration altogether another; everything in its 
place." Yes, by all means, everything in its place; 
but where is the place from which you will shut out 
God? What is there does not belong to him? What 
can you do that has not in it the stamp of right or 
wrong? Will you shut out God from his world? 
for it is all his — this great rich web of life, with its in- 
terests and gains, its joys and sorrows. Will you shut 
out from the feast the Giver of that feast ? Will you 
blot the painter's name from his work ? He is a part 
of it, and to say, "We will have life/its joys and toils, 
the wonder and glory of it; but we will not have God 
in it; except in our devotional hours, our church 
days," is like saying, " We will live, but we will have 
the sun only in a few fenced-off fields." 

The blessedness of life is to feel the Divine Presence 



Christ's knowledge and love of men. 257 

ever pressing on us as the atmosphere, ever kindling 
our hopes, cheering our failures, like the sun. This 
shrinking from the companionship of God in the com- 
mon hours of life is nothing but the secret conviction 
of our wrong living coming to the surface. It is the 
child shrinking from the Father's presence because it 
has been breaking the Father's law. 



CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE OF. MEN. 

The marvel is that knowing men as he does, Christ 
neither despairs of human nature nor despises it. He 
goes on his calm persistent way, enduring men, bear- 
ing with them, hoping for them, believing in them, 
saving them. And this, after all, is the only really in- 
extinguishable hope for human nature, for men, for our- 
selves. His calm, penetrating, hopeful vision of men 
makes it possible for us to believe in them. 

His vision goes deeper than the outward crust of 
dullness, of coarseness, of deceit, and sees what is really 
valuable underneath. This vision was ever before the 
Saviour's eye. He loved men. He loved the priceless 
jewel of humanity in each, for that meant to him not 
merely a certain nature interesting in its gifts, its pre- 
sent condition, but a divine possibility. He loved a 
human soul because it was of God and had inherent in 
it a likeness to God, a capacity for spiritual beauty and 
nobleness. He saw mirrored in each poor narrow 
nature that spread its uncleanness before him, a picture 
17 



258 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

of heaven and the heavenly condition. As one looking 
into a road-side pool sees presently in the muddy depth 
a picture of the stainless blue and snowy clouds above, 
so Christ's penetrating love sees in every human soul 
a possible heaven, and this is the love that breaks 
through the barriers of sin and deadness. 

Nothing so assures us that the great divine love of 
Jesus is a practical thing, a force commensurate to the 
hard facts of human nature, as this calm penetrating 
vision of men in their actual condition that everywhere 
in the Gospels goes with it. There can be no trans- 
forming power in any affection that has not truth for 
its core. Now, Christ's love is founded on reality; it 
is no mere burst of sentiment. It knows us just as 
we are ; it does not see us at our worst or at our best, 
but altogether in that completeness of what we are 
and what we may become. It goes to the bottom of 
us, leaves nothing out, and so it cannot die. There is 
nothing in you to be yet revealed to his searching 
eye. Surprises in the future of your soul's history, 
doubtless there are for you ; but none for him. Do 
not be afraid that the long stretch of unfolding faults, 
of unsuspected meannesses suddenly blossoming out 
of the dark places in your heart shall ever change 
him. He has known you to the roots of your being 
before you knew him. 

If there is one thing above all others to rest on in 
our Saviour's love, it is this assurance that he is not 
blind to our faults. He sees the gangrene in the soul, 
and behind the gangrene he sees the possibility of 



CHRIST S KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE OF MEN. 259 

health and soundness that his touch can call into reality. 
The very truthfulness of Christ's vision of us gives the 
measure of his love. To know that he has read me, 
to hear him say, " Ye seek me because ye did eat of 
the loaves and were filled," and then to see his eye 
still bent on me in pity and in love, is to carry a thrill 
of hope into the soul. Have you ever thought of the 
deep meaning in that saying, " He knew what was in 
man?" At first it looks like a cynical saying, as if 
to emphasize the paltriness and baseness of men, by 
showing how Christ read them. But that is the sur- 
face meaning only. Keep it in mind as you read of 
Christ's intercourse with common men and women, 
with the woman of Samaria, the ten lepers, the hungry 
multitude. You see his pity, his patience, his tender- 
ness. Knowing all man's sin, and hardness, and 
spiritual stupor, he looks deeper than we can see, he 
sees another world opening below that bad inner 
nature. 

" He knows what is in man:" — the deep mystery 
we can never understand of the heavenly capacity in 
the soul, of its slumbering likeness to God. And so 
he talks to the dull greedy crowd of the meat which 
perisheth not, of the bread which came down from 
heaven, of eternal life. He is reaching down after the 
deeper nature he knows is in them, the essence oT 
humanity which is the likeness of God, the indestruct- 
ible capacity for heaven and sainthood, and all the 
blessedness of righteousness. Christ sees that. He 
sees it in you. And the vision is one of the secrets 



260 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

of his power; for by his persistent belief in our better 
possibility, he makes us believe in it ourselves. 



INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH CHRIST. 



Christ realizes for us our individuality; he makes 
us feel each for himself his own separate worth, the 
weight and value of life in each as a unique quality. 
He brings out that inward craving for recognition of 
our individuality which is so deep and real, and yet 
of which we are often so ashamed, and stamps it as 
legitimate. He shows us that our sense of separate- 
ness from all others is not merely our fancy about our- 
selves, but that it is a real distinction. We see it pro- 
jected as a solid image on the mirror of his knowledge 
and valuation of us. 

In this respect Christ only brings to completeness 
what the Bible does throughout: he fulfills what the 
Law does in rude beginnings. For the religion of the 
Bible is an individualizing religion. It is always seek- 
ing to deal with men, not in masses, but in separate 
personalities. It sets each man alone before God. 

And this sense of the separateness of men, of the 
worth and responsibility of the individual, has gone 
on increasing as Christianity has penetrated human 
nature. You have only to think how it has worked 
in changing the relations of the citizen and the state, 
in the release of men to freedom and personal contact 
with God in the Reformation, in the fixing of the right 



INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH CHRIST. 26 1 

of private judgment, and even the diseased forms of 
self-consciousness which mark its extravagant devel- 
opment in modern civilization, to feel how individual- 
izing a force is the religion of Christ. 

Let us see, then, how Christ meets the craving we 
all feel for individual recognition, our desire for dis- 
tinctness. At first we may feel that this desire is 
wrong, and that we can only look for Christ to con- 
demn it. Ought we to crave recognition for our pe- 
culiar quality of life — ought we to wish to have a 
separateness from the mass ? It is clear that this crav- 
ing does, in its sinful development, become the root of 
a whole class of sins, some of them the most fatal to 
a life with God — vanity, pride, egotism, self-assertion, 
ambition. The politician straining for a higher pedes- 
tal on which to display his astuteness, the writer pos- 
turing and grimacing for originality, the preacher 
searching for strange themes and determined to make 
men hear him: how we blame them, scorn them, laugh 
at their egotism ! Then there are the lower forms of 
this craving, the ridiculous, the terrible forms : the 
man who parades his family descent, the criminals 
who, rather than be unknown, write their names in 
deeds that make men shudder. What are all these 
doing but trying to extract themselves from the slough 
of oblivion, to rise above the sense of being forgotten, 
effaced? But what a pitiable thing it is to feel that 
whether they make men attend to them or not, they 
are all missing the mark! If they only knew what 
that craving was that drove them on to such efforts, 



26i SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

and how there was One who knew and valued the true 
separate self in every one of them ! 

For in Christ this craving has its fulfilment. He 
gives it its true, pure scope. The satisfaction of our 
individuality is in Christ's recognition of us ; in his 
personal reading of our heart, and his definite, separate 
knowledge of us. Observe how, for instance, in the 
case of Nathaniel, Christ's eye singled him out, defined 
him, made him feel in a sound, healthful way his real 
separateness, when he said: "Behold an Israelite, in- 
deed, in whom is no guile." Nathaniel saith unto him, 
"Whence knowest thou me?" Jesus answered and 
said unto him, " Before that Philip called thee when 
thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee." And Nathan- 
iel's experience is only a vivid illustration of Christ's 
habitual way of dealing with men. Think of all the 
men and women he met, and how at his touch they start 
out from the indistinguishable mass, figures, ever since 
Jesus looked at them and heard them, apart, unique. 
Take the family at Bethany, an humble obscure group 
as ever made a household, the type of myriads of 
homes unknown in the shadows of seclusion, and how 
as we read, 4< Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, 
and Lazarus," the figures start into distinctness ; how 
individual, how portrait-like they stand before us ! 
Think of the poor widow who came one day to the 
temple — what crowds of widows there were in Jerusa- 
lem, to the carnal eye all alike in their weeds of 
mourning, in their lowly insignificance — but Jesus is 
sitting there, he reads her heart, and with a word he 



INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH CHRIST. 263 

draws her out of the crowd, sets her apart, and forever 
she stands before the ages a singular soul, the widow 
with the two mites, the most generous spirit that 
visited the temple that day. Even out of the depths 
of infamy and sin, he draws men in whom wickedness 
seems to have blurred every feature, and by a word 
re-chisels the soul into uniqueness. How like all 
other thieves was that poor wretch who hung by his 
side on the cross : one of the millions degraded, 
blunted, corrupted into indistinguishableness. But 
Christ is near him ; the subtle influence of the Divine 
man goes to this man's heart ; he says his few words 
of confession, of rebuke to his fellow thief; he breathes 
his short prayer ; and Christ's word stamps again the 
impress of individuality on the poor defaced soul, and 
he goes away into Paradise, a figure unmistakable, like 
no other that ever lived, forever. So through innum- 
erable instances Christ might be shown, flooding the 
light of his recognition on one and another soul before 
indistinguishable, but henceforth marked, vivid to all 
time. 

What mere ciphers they all were until Christ turned 
his light upon them ! What vivid portraits of sepa- 
rate men and women ever since ! He comes to our 
withered individualities, blighted in the shade of men's 
ignorance of us, and he says as he did one day in the 
synagogue to the man with the withered hand, " Stand 
forth !" and then we are set apart, each known, marked 
as himself. What a wonderful gift of God to us is 
this; the personal, searching, vivifying knowledge 



264 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

Christ has of us! The omniscience that gathers all 
souls in its wide glance, to whom there is nothing hid, 
nothing forgotten, nothing too small — the omniscience 
that comes out of the vagueness and blankness of the 
divine attribute, and consecrates itself in the glance of 
a personal Saviour on each one, and sets him apart in 
its knowing, its appreciation, its love, as it first set him 
apart in its creation ! — no wonder St. Paul prayed for 
the Ephesians that they might be "able to compre- 
hend with all saints, what is the breadth and length 
and depth and height; and to know the love of Christ 
which passeth knowledge." 

What a picture it sets before us, too, of the great 
human family ! What a vitality and light as from a 
new day bursting upon the toiling masses of men, 
does it bring, to think that all these are to one eye as 
individual as our children are to us! Is there not 
something dreary and oppressive in the impression a 
great throng of unknown men produces — the spectacle 
of the crowds that pour through the streets of a 
strange city? Like a flood they pour along, as indis- 
tinguishable as the drops in a river. And as we think 
of the millions all alike, the drops in the human sea, 
our hearts sink : so many, so indistinguishable, a 
million hearts beating like one, and nothing but ob- 
scurity for all: what a sad place is a strange, great 
city ! How the multitudes roll over our imagination, 
like waves drowning our hope and sympathy! But 
that is only our weakness of vision. If Christ stood 
by us, as each soul came by, his look and word would 



INDIVIDUALITY THROUGH CHRIST. 265 

touch an invisible spring, and out of the blank mon- 
otony would spring an individual portrait : every 
soul is solitary, separate, to him. 

This, I am sure, is the solution of the problem how 
we shall satisfy our longing for an individual recogni- 
tion, appreciation, and not fall into a life of self-asser- 
tion and egotism. It is to carry this hunger to Christ. 
But we must remember that the individuality he 
recognizes, and whose claims he satisfies, is a moral 
individuality ; the separation in our life that he will 
stamp as real, is one of character, not of circumstances, 
gifts, manner, intellect, accomplishments. 




SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 



THE CHRISTIAN PILGRIMAGE. 

" Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, 
and from thy Father's house unto a land that I will 
shew thee," thus the call comes to one after another, 
and one after another goes forth a stranger and a pil- 
grim. We do not hear it in visions of the night, 
in solemn voices from heaven, as haply Abraham heard 
it ; it is only the still small voice speaking within ; but 
it bids us forth and we go. We do not, like Abra- 
ham, gather our goods and families and journey to 
strange lands; we do not, like the hermits of early 
ages, bid farewell to wife and brother and child and hie 
to the desert to sojourn a pilgrim till the end comes; 
we do not, as the pious in later times, sell all and shut 
out the world by the convent door, waiting in the cold 
cell the summons to go home — but the inward separa- 
tion is made. We are pilgrims in our houses, strangers 
among our friends, the solid mansion is only a tent, the 
familiar scenes are only a foreign land. It is borne in 
on us that we are not home. We are separated by the 
widest of all separations, the wandering of the heart. 
Our heart is in heaven; for our treasure is there. We 
sojourn as in a strange country. 

(266) 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 267 

BENEFITS OF RESTRAINT. 

There never is a time when we can afford to be set 
wholly free, to feel that now we may do just as we 
please, that no one sees us, that we shall not be called 
to account. From the cradle to the grave we are set 
by God's providence in angles of observation where 
the light always falls on us, where the sense of 
accountability bites in on the conscience and reason, 
and we are made to feel more or less " for this, too, I 
must give an answer." 

Men talk a great deal, especially in these days, of 
the nobility of freedom, of the servility of a religion 
that always has a sense of restraint, a taste of the bit- 
terness of dread in it. We are told that a man should 
be a law unto himself, that goodness should be spon- 
taneous. And there is a measure of truth in it. Per- 
fect love does cast out fear. A sanctified man, an 
angel in heaven, a saint in glory, will not need to be 
sensible of being watched; he will have the law in 
himself. That is a noble, a grand state; but it is the 
state of heaven, of a perfection far beyond us. But 
even that does not dispense with the element of 
accountability. Perfect love casts out fear, not because 
it gets rid of the idea of being under observation, with 
God's eye on it, but because it has got rid of all the 
lawlessness, the hidden veins of evil, which make God's 
eye a menace and terror. 



268 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

SUFFERING. 

" It is the misfortune of kings," said a German 
statesman, " that they have no one to tell them the 
truth." Everything is softened and colored not to of- 
fend them; and so they live in an unreal world. And 
it is so with us when we are not subjected to suffering. 
God's gifts act like non-conductors ; wealth, and health, 
and success, all make a world in which we live, on 
the outside of which is God. Now distance from God 
is distance from strength and heat and spiritual reality ; 
just as distance from the sun is distance from warmth 
and force. And now comes the crashing blow that 
breaks down the palace wall, scatters the courtiers, 
tears away the silken curtains. The king is de- 
throned, and he walks forth to face the realities of 
things. And trouble comes, wealth flees, health fades, 
all the springs in the oasis are dry, and the desert is 
eating its parched way up to the man ; he must perish ! 
No, there is one deep well that never dries ; it is the 
being of God; it is the presence of the Divine brood- 
ing Spirit. Then the soul does one of two things ; it 
finds out the hollowness of its pretended faith; it re- 
alizes that it never knew God at all, but that its Di- 
vinity was success, happiness, the flow and gladness of 
mere existence; or it rises up through throes and 
agonies that cleave down to the bottom of the spirit, 
and reaches out and touches God. It finds that man 
can live without riches, or friends, or strength of body, 
if only he clasps God. And this is a real knowledge. 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 269 

It is a coming nearer to the sun. What a profound 
word of Job that is, after the storm of his trials had 
passed and he returned to his rest in God : " I have 
heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine 
eye seeth thee." 



LISTENING TO GOD'S VOICE. 

" Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." In those 
few words of Samuel lay the secret of his great life. 
The wisdom of Samuel throughout all his acts was 
that the touch of God's hand was constantly felt on 
his heart. And this must be the secret of our lives. 
If they are to deepen and widen and go on increasing 
in strength and holiness till at last they appear before 
God, then they must forever be feeling his touch. 
Not in our activities undertaking great things, not in 
our gifts that charm and convince men, not in our 
keen feelings and raptures and delightful visions of 
the spiritual world — in none of these things is the 
power of the religious life; but in this that at every 
turn we are listening to catch the still small voice, 
which when heard and followed makes life success. 
How simple the problem of life becomes with this 
key. It is only this, that we are constantly led of 
God. 

Often, however, our souls are deaf to God's voice, 
because they are pre-occupied. This pre-occupation 
makes every voice speak with an earthly meaning. 
God's voice is intercepted by the roar of the world, in 



270 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

which we are struggling. It finds no ear in us, let it 
speak never so tenderly, urgently. 

Would you have this gift, that began with Samuel's 
childhood, and went with him to old age? Would 
you hear God speaking to you ? That very longing 
is the voice of God to you : you hear it dimly, as one 
half awakened ; it is God speaking in your soul, say- 
ing, " open thine ear, and I will speak a word for 
thee!" But you do not know how to listen, how to 
get where the voice shall reach you. You must go 
into your closet; you must shut the door; you must 
call for God ; you must wait for him ; you must keep 
listening, looking, waiting. He is there. You do not 
hear him, but he is speaking; his thought and wish 
for you are going forth ; they will reach you. But 
you must wait on the Lord. Strain your vision into 
the thick darkness; hold your ear to that awful 
silence, and sooner or later out of the darkness a form 
will grow, a face will shine, a voice will sound. God 
will speak to you, and tell you all you need to know. 
You shall hear him more and more continual-ly 
through all the roar of the world. Life will be full of 
his voice; all voices will be his. 



THE CLOSEST FRIEND. 

What a refuge from a cold world is the thought of 
Christ's knowledge of us. There are times when life 
wears a hard and lonely aspect even to the most 
favored. We taste the strange bitterness of the sep- 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 27 I 

arateness in which each soul is set. At such times 
the nearest do not seem to touch us ; and while we 
shrink from the prying attempts of man to get at our 
secret thoughts, yet we long for a knowledge that 
can read all our inward life, appreciate its perplexities, 
burdens, wishes, and bring the touch of sympathy. 
But think : there is One that knows. Not a thought, 
not a wish, not a vague impalpable yearning rising 
like a dim mist in the depth of your heart, but is seen 
of him. Think of it in the lonely hour when you cry 
" all have forsaken me." Think of it in the silent 
night watches when the rush of thought grows op- 
pressive. Think of it in the great crowd where the 
thousand unknown faces make the sense of your soli- 
tude strike in like a winter chill. Think — there is 
One that knows you, reads you, answers you. 



GRACE TO BEAR SUFFERING. 

Suffering when it first meets us seems the strongest 
thing in the universe, but when we find that there is 
something stronger, God's might and grace, we have 
made a great discovery. It is the opening of a new 
world. I ask you, ought we not to praise God more 
for grace to bear our sorrow than for sorrow's re- 
moval? In the one case God only puts out his hand 
and takes off our load; in the other he comes into the 
soul and bears the load with us. Then we are made 
partakers of the Divine nature, we are one with him, 
we feel the beating of the Divine heart against our 



272 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

own, and we stagger on, weak, yet oh, how strong ! I 
would rather have God come into my life and help me 
carry my load, than have him send an angel to take it 
off In the one way we only get rid of pain ; in the 
other we are filled with God. 



THE TRUE PATH IN LIFE. 

There is a rule of life, very popular in these days, 
that every man may find his right career mapped out 
for him in his favorite tastes : what you like to do, 
what you incline to naturally, that is your calling. But 
that, it seems to me, is a very short-sighted rule. Its 
fault is that it takes no account of any life but this ; it 
leaves God and his individual and personal guidance 
of each one of us out of the question. To say that to 
succeed one must only do what he naturally inclines 
to, seems to me utterly pagan. It makes life to be 
measured only by the happiness of the hour, by the 
results that appear here, while Christ teaches us that 
life is to be measured by its eternal results. But even 
for results here, it is not true that only the work we 
have a natural bent for is fruitful work. How many 
lives that are useful and blessed of God and man travel 
in shadow and with constraint through the whole arc 
of life here ; but we know they travel truly, and when 
the circle is complete beyond it will lie at last in light. 
St. Augustine was educated for a rhetorician, and he 
loved the splendor and excitement of his conspicuous 
place in Rome. But he was called to be a preacher 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 273 

of the Word: it seemed to him that he could not take 
the office, and it was in spite of tears and reluctance 
that he was ordained. But once called, he followed. 
He went forward cheerfully and with his whole heart ; 
and what an impress he has left on the Christian 
Church! 

Do not complain, then, of your life and its duties. 
Do not waste your strength and freshness in dreaming 
of what you might have done. You may not be in 
the path most congenial to you; you may seem to 
yourself to be wasting your best powers ; but if God's 
providence has turned your steps that way, it is your 
path, you must tread it: there is no other way for you. 
Only listen for God's voice ; at every turn wait for his 
whisper. You shall be directed and the hard path 
prove to you the true path. 



THE SOUL'S VALUE. 

We are continually saying that men think too highly 
of themselves; and they do, of what they are, of their 
wit and grace and skill and power. But of what they 
may be, of the hidden treasures of their spiritual 
being, they think almost nothing at all ; as if a man 
should value the curious ugliness of a lily bulb and 
make nothing of the lovely flower that is to come out 
of it. You do not think enough of yourself. You do 
not value your real self as highly as Jesus does. He 
died for it; you fling it down in the dust; you sneer 
at its heavenly instincts; you are tempted at times to 



274 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

sell it for a bauble, a bit of worldly tinsel, that soul of 
which he is asking you " What shall you give in ex- 
change for it ? " 



THE CURE FOR EGOTISM. 

A great writer has said that vanity can never be 
cured ; that a man once an egotist is one always, 
whether saint or sinner. That may be true of all mere 
self-culture. But there is a cure in Christ ; it is the 
cure that comes from the vision of God, eclipsing the 
vision of self; it is the cure for the dazzle of the lamp 
by the rising of the sun. The soul that is hidden in 
the vision of God's great glory is hid away from ego- 
tism. 



PRAYING ALWAYS. 

Discipleship to Jesus is not something that can be 
put on and taken off as our convenience and necessity 
may require. If we follow at all, we must follow al- 
ways ; if we are Christ's at any time, we must be his at 
all times. Religion is not a business of Sundays and 
prayer-meetings, of closet hours and revival seasons 
only ; it is a business of every day and every hour of 
the day, of every place and every engagement of life. 

So Jesus tells us, that we ought " always to pray," 
and we read of Cornelius that he "prayed to God al- 
ways." If he prayed to God always, then he did not 
pray formally a set prayer, for then would he have 
prayed only on the festivals, in the morning and in the 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. . 275 

evening, and possibly, if very exact and punctilious, 
like Daniel, at noon. But we are told that he " prayed 
always;" then he did not only pray merely when he 
was in trouble. The burdens of sorrow, and pain, and 
bereavement, will often set men to praying, and they 
are very earnest while the goad pricks and the wound 
is yet sore: but it is not always night, even in this dark 
world; sunny days come, hours of joy and rest; then 
the prayer which sorrow indited ceases, as the summer 
brooks stop running when the storm is over. But 
Cornelius prayed always. How could he do it? He 
was a busy man, with many worldly cares. Is it pos- 
sible to obey the Apostle when he tells us to " pray 
without ceasing?" Yes, when prayer is the free spon- 
taneous lifting up of the spirit to God, and not the 
mere repetition of a form, or the forcing of a reluctant 
mind and heart into the presence of a neglected God — 
then, we can " pray without ceasing." To pray always, 
it is not necessary to be always saying prayers, or 
framing the heart's desires into palpable petitions. 
The fountain shoots its tall column heavenward; it 
would send the silvery shaft, with its musical sheeny 
spray upward forever; but a stone is laid on its mouth, 
and the column falls, but the spring, the joyful leap is 
there, though shut down; take but away the repressing 
stone, and again it leaps upward, with its feathery 
spray and quivering dart of gladness. So, in the child 
of God is the fountain of prayer; his heart leaps up 
to the blessed God; he wakes in the morning to send 
the beautiful shaft of his petitions and praises to Jesus ; 



276 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

but the necessary, lawful cares of his home, his busi- 
ness, his weariness, his very duties of religion, lay a 
stone on the mouth of the fountain, and he seems not 
to pray; but deep within, the strong spring and mighty 
leap of the heart's desire wait only for the care to be 
taken off, the business to be laid aside, and again will 
the soul go up to its God. The fountain would play 
forever, the soul would pray without ceasing ; that is 
praying always. 



RELIGION. 

The religion of Christ is in its final aim — in its 
highest and perfect form — a personal relation, and not 
a service. Religion is a state of heart towards God. 
Sin is spoken of in the Scriptures as a state of aliena- 
tion from God: this seems to sum up all its guilt and 
misery — this fathoms the depth of its ruin, and ex- 
poses the very essence and lowest foundation of its 
nature. Religion, then, is no more than a reversal of 
this — it is the resumption of that first ordained relation 
between God and the soul, of love and harmony; and 
it is a great mistake to take its first crude forms for its 
last mature life. Now so many Christians never get 
beyond the first stage of religion, namely the stage of 
service, that it is easy for one looking over the church, 
and judging of the divine life by those who are but 
imperfectly living it, to suppose that service is the 
highest form of godliness. One might as well walk 
through a forest where the oaks had been stunted and 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 277 

dwarfed, and say oak trees were never intended to 
grow tall. Consider now what the divine life, in its 
ripened, perfected form, is intended to be. I say it is 
a life, not of service primarily, but of love ; service is 
included in its broad sweep, but not as its chief end 
and aim. Service means work done for wages, but 
Christian living is not for compensation ; it may take 
that shape at first — the believer may honestly take 
Christ as a Saviour, and not as a Friend ; this is the 
first crude form ; but the higher final form is that of 
love, and then service comes, not first, but in the train 
of love as a handmaid. Then the Christian serves 
Christ as a friend. 



FAITHFULNESS IN SMALL THINGS. 

I fear sometimes we are slack to till our plot in the 
vineyard because it is not a conspicuous place. We 
want to do work that shall shine; well, yes, and so we 
ought to wish; but shine in whose eyes? in that of 
our fellow-workmen, or in those of the Master? Is it 
the applause of men we crave — to be known as a con- 
spicuous church, an influential church, a stately, cul- 
tured, popular church ? Or, is it the praise of the 
great Judge who accounts that one greatest, man or 
church, who serves most faithfully and unselfishly? 
One man builds the spire in the sight of all eyes, and 
another lays the foundation deep out of sight. But 
the spire-builder is no greater in the final fame of the 
temple than the foundation-layer. 



2^8 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

It is a shame to think of our work as a small work, 
or to complain that what we do is hid away in a 
corner. There are no corners to God. "The dark- 
ness and the light are both alike to him." Let the 
pastor toiling in the lonely hamlet with his parish 
scattered over the hills remember that. He is set to 
purify the fountains. He toils among the roots of 
things. There are no shouts for his work now among 
those silent valleys, but some day it will appear in its 
solid fruit. And let our home mission work go on 
planting the church of Christ in far-off and forgotten 
places. We need not be discouraged because no 
flourish of trumpets accompanies this toil; its flourish 
will come when the end crowns the work. 



THE GREAT DAYS OF GOD. 

It is in our age as it has always been, the great 
days of God come, and to many who live in them they 
seem only poor, flat, empty days ; they complain of 
the insipidity of life. It was so when Jesus lived on 
the earth; it was so when the Apostles were convert- 
ing the Roman Empire; it was so when Luther thun- 
dered at the gates of Rome. In every stirring age 
there were men yawning over the dull days, and 
women killing the weary time by frivolous devices. 
And it is so now. The century is pouring into the 
ear of history a new story of Christian heroism and 
achievement; and in all our churches there are men 
and women who are gaping for very weariness, and 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 279 

praying for some new sensation in religion, while the 
critics are vaporing about the decay of faith and the 
decline of Christianity. Were the Master to speak, 
would he not say to us as he did to the poor, weary, 
old religionists and the sneering critics of his day, 
" Ye can discern the face of the sky ; but can ye not dis- 
cern the signs of the times ? " 



THE COMMON SENSE SCHOOL OF PHIL- 
OSOPHY. 

Great as its virtues are, the common sense school 
has this defect, it insists on explaining everything: 
everything in the universe must be as plain as the 
multiplication table; no haze on its horizon, no dim- 
ness in its sky. But, then, the horizon on which there 
is no haze is a very contracted one, and the sky that 
has no dimness is not the illimitable vault that unrolls 
itself above us every night. The trouble with the 
common sense school, from Aristotle down, is that it 
has no place for the infinite, the mysterious, that sense 
of unfathomableness and awe which come to us with 
the glimpses which both nature and the Bible give us 
of being and truth, distinct enough for us to form some 
idea of, to be impressed and inspired by, but too vast 
for us to comprehend or explain. Now Lutheranism 
does not belong to the school of common sense ; it is 
Platonic, and not Aristotelian. It has its bright, lum- 
inous centre, Christ, the Incarnate Son, the brightness 
of the Father's glory and the express image of his per- 



280 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

son, in whose light we can walk unperplexed ; but, 
then, from him the universe natural and spiritual, melts 
away into infinite gradations of being, the last of which 
is but a faint mist on the illimitable horizon. 



CHRISTMAS. 

It is a very wonderful thing, when we stop to think 
of it, that eighteen hundred years after the poor peas- 
ant child was born in that dim Eastern land, the great 
civilized world should be celebrating his birth-day with 
such pomp and holiday ; celebrating it more splendidly 
and elaborately every year. Out of that rude age of 
semi-barbarism, from that uncultured peasant home, 
the gentle Teacher stretches out his hand and lays it 
on the history, the holidays, the literature and art, the 
religion and morality, of the world's finest civilization, 
and says, " These are mine ; " and men, whether they 
acknowledge him or not, have to answer, " Yes, Jesus 
of Nazareth, they are thine." That, I think, is the 
ever-growing marvel of Christmas. Over and over 
again as the season comes round, though all the year 
men have been arguing against him, rejecting him, de- 
riding him, the world gathers about the manger and 
honors the Babe of Bethlehem. All the year men tug 
at the chain which binds them to his throne, and then 
on Christmas day acknowledge that, somehow or 
other, Jesus of Nazareth has won a greater sway over 
human lives. Is that not a marvel ? 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 28 1 



CHRIST'S INFLUENCE ON THE WORLD. 

It is not too much to say that Christ has trans- 
formed the conscience, the affections, the very passions 
of the race. The modern sympathy for animals, the 
sense of responsibility for wealth and power, the con- 
viction that national strength gives no justification for 
aggression, the quick compassion for all classes of the 
weak and suffering, the growing abhorrence of violence 
and impurity, the deepening estimate of the value of 
truth — these wonderful signs of the Christian spirit 
are found almost as much outside the church as with- 
in; and what does their appearance indicate but the 
growing power of Christ over men's thoughts and 
feelings? Men do not see him; and yet they are 
moulded by him. The very wishes of their souls are 
being transformed under the touch of hands invisible 
to them : they are the hands which clung to Mary's 
breast that first Christmas morning in Bethlehem. I 
cannot open a great novel or poem, or read a respect- 
able newspaper, but I hear the Christian accent sound- 
ing in every sentence. There is not a great statesman 
but must, if he would keep the respect and confidence 
of the nation, at least profess allegiance to the great 
principles of truth, human brotherhood, sympathy for 
the oppressed, which are the very birth-mark of Chris- 
tianity. The age is Christian, and growing more 
Christian. Some of its great thinkers, it is true, vehe- 
mently disclaim the name of Christ. Be it so. They 



282 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

may refuse to march under his banner, but fight his 
battles they must. 



NEARNESS TO CHRIST. 

The personal element in religion is the last to 
ripen. Christ is clear to us as a Teacher, a Re- 
deemer, a King, long before he is vivid as a personal 
Friend. How shadowy, far-off, does this Saviour 
often seem! What shall bring him closer? The 
" faith which worketh by love." Obedience is the 
skilful artist who, touch by touch, year after year, is 
bringing out the features, the smile, the deep look of 
the eyes, into reality. Every deed done for him, 
every sacrifice made in his name, every sorrow cheer- 
fully taken because he sends it, is adding a clearness 
to the vision of his presence. 



A CHRISTMAS THOUGHT. 

The repetition of those words, "Unto you is born 
this day a Saviour," should be like coming back to 
look at the portrait of a friend that is being painted 
for us ; every Christmas we should find it nearer per- 
fection. 

When we turn to this portrait this year can we say, 
"Ah, how much more life-like, more real he is than 
last year?" Then our Christmas days are steps climb- 
ing up from earth to heaven. Each year we are 
mounting higher; each year the face that looks down 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 283 

on us is more vivid, clear, near. What an incompar- 
able gift from Christ to us is it, if on this Christmas 
morning we can say, 

" I see Him still nearer whom always I see." 



SORROW THE CURE OF SHALLOWNESS. 

Can a human soul be truly great and deep that does 
not taste, yes, drink deeply, of the bitterness of life? 
Who can read the histories of the noblest characters of 
the Bible, who can trace the steps of the one perfect 
man, learning obedience by the things which he suf- 
fered, and not feel that it is possible to be too happy- 
yes, too innocently happy? 

A life happy, and only happy, is like a virgin prairie : 
it is bright with verdure and flowers, but it never yields 
a harvest worth garnering. For that the ploughshare 
must tear it up, turn under its green and purple and 
gold, and bring the under mould to the corrosion of 
wind and rain; then comes the rich grain. 

Mere happiness, the delight of living, leaves us shal- 
low. That is what the Bible is repeating over and 
over. " It is good for me that I have been afflicted ; 
that I might learn thy statutes!" — there it is. The 
writer of that had been a happy boy, wandering among 
the fields, drinking in the delight of mere living : what 
a blessed thing the sunshine was, how gay the flowers, 
how intoxicating the fresh breeze, his liberty, his sen- 
sation! But if he goes on wandering through the sun- 
shine, he will never be anything but an unthinking 



<?84 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

boy. " Before I was afflicted I went astray;" that is, he 
had no purpose, he was out of the path, he made no 
progress. Then came the shadow, the storm, the fear, 
the anguish of life ; these drive him out of the happy 
fields into the school ; then he begins to ponder ; he 
opens the book of life and learns the meaning of things; 
he is miserable, he is suffering, and his misery takes 
him below the surface of things; thought deepens, feel- 
ing intensifies; he is learning God's statutes. He says, 
" Oh, how unhappy I am !" Yes, but how much 
larger he is. 

There are three directions in which sorrow enlarges 
our horizon. Of course there is nothing in sorrow it- 
self that necessarily deepens or expands character: 
suffering withers, contracts, embitters a bad will, even 
while it acuminates it. But we are speaking now of a 
right will, of a Christian soul, and what sorrow does 
for it. 

Sorrow expands downward, and outward, and up- 
ward. 

It takes us down into ourselves. It is all very well 
for children to be unconscious of themselves, but there 
is something feeble in the life of a man that has never 
turned in on itself and pondered the meaning of its 
own existence. There is an unconsciousness, a losing 
of self in a greater, higher life, which does restore to 
us the beautiful simplicity of childhood; but that comes 
only when we have gone through the knowledge of 
ourselves, and then committed self to the keeping of 
God. But for a life to be truly deep and great, 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 285 

the soul must first explore itself. What words 
of experience those are, " I thought on my ways, and 
turned my feet unto thy testimonies;" and that picture 
of the prodigal son — " he came to himself." Well, 
the sorrow of life takes us by the hand and leads us 
down out of the sunshine into the deep chambers of 
the soul ; it brings us to ourselves. 

It opens outward as well as inward, for it interprets 
to us what is within men: once walk in the shadow, 
know the bitterness of bereavement, disappointment, 
pain, the nameless melancholy of dejection, and it is as 
though the figures about us had become transparent ; 
we look through them; we see the world of fears, 
hopes, joys, pains, that make each man's life: how the 
horizon has widened ! God has struck the chord of 
anguish in us, and all around us ; from human hearts 
we hear the answering vibration : we know men; we 
have entered into the complexity of the inner life. 
How deeply interesting that makes the world of hu- 
manity ! What a yearning toward our suffering breth- 
ren comes with our own experience of pain; what an 
extinction of old aversions and repulsions sorrow 
brings ! We learn to love suffering men because we 
have suffered. 

Most precious of all, it opens our vision upward. It 
has sometimes been questioned whether a perfectly 
happy man would ever think of God. 

A life where the sun of happiness never sets has no 
beyond. It is sweet — but so narrow ! Now, God will not 
have us narrow. We are his children, and something 



286 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

of the sweep and vastness of his being he will have us 
discover. He will reveal to us the immeasurable 
greatness and glory of himself, and so he draws aside 
the veil of our happiness which hides him. He makes 
it dark; loved faces fade in the shadow, bright scenes 
grow dim, the gloom enters the soul, and then we 
throw up our faces, and lo ! God shines out through 
the abysmal depths of our night. "When he slew 
them, then they remembered that God was their 
Rock." 



PENTECOST. 

THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT. 

Pentecost is an experience that must be enacted in 
every disciple's experience. How many there are in 
our churches, honest, well-meaning souls, who, if they 
put their experience into words, would have to say 
with those St. Paul questioned at Ephesus, " We have 
not so much as heard whether there be any Holy 
Ghost." They are not un-Christian, but only blindly 
Christian. They know of a Saviour; they have read 
of him in the Gospels, they have heard of him by the 
hearing of the ear, and they painfully strive to conform 
their lives to what they understand to be his will; but 
they have never known him as a present, realized 
Saviour. Feebly they grasp him and hope to be saved 
by him, as certainly they may be; but they have never 
felt the strong grasp of Christ upon them, that convic- 
tion of life from him and in him which makes a man 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 287 

forget his old questions about whether he shall be 
saved, in the strong, clear consciousness of a present 
salvation in a justifying and life-giving Saviour. Now 
it is one great work of the Spirit, his first Pentecostal 
work, to do this for us. He changes our " Lord, I 
believe, help thou mine unbelief," to the grander word 
" I know whom I have believed." 

It is the experience of Pentecost that gives individ- 
uality and originality to the religious life. Dr. Alex- 
ander, in one of his charming books, complains of the 
tameness and monotony of the mass of Christian lives. 
The souls in a church seemed like the houses in a city 
street where 

" The houses are all alike you know : 
All the houses alike in a row." 

That is the result of a groping faith which has failed 
to appropriate vigorously a Saviour brought within 
by the work of the Spirit. When the Spirit comes he 
does for the soul what the sun does for the flowers : 
in the dark cellar all the plants wear a pallid monot- 
ony, but put them in the sun, and out of each the sun 
draws into distinctness its appropriate color, no one 
like another. For what the Spirit does is to bring the 
things of Christ to the soul, that each may embrace 
the Saviour as its own particular Saviour. But Christ 
realized in the life of each soul is appropriated accord- 
ing to the soul's natural bent: Christ in St. Paul did 
not give the same type of character and turn of 
thought as in St. John or St. Peter. But in each one 
Christ realizes and brings out the individual bent of 



288 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

the man. To be the more deeply and intimately- 
rooted in Christ, then, is to be the more particularly 
and individually ourselves. 

Would we have our religious experience written, 
not over another man's copy, but in the fresh lines of 
our own individuality? Then the Holy Spirit must 
take the pen from our hands and show us what is our 
own style. 



THE HOPE OF EASTER. 

The Easter idea may be given in one word, one of 
the greatest of Christian words, Hope. It is this which 
runs like a golden thread through St. Paul's chapter 
on the resurrection, the great Easter-day chapter of 
the New Testament. " If Christ be not risen, then is 
our preaching vain — if Christ be not raised, your faith 
is vain. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, 
we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ 
risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of 
them that slept." How the trumpet sounds through 
these great words ; nothing of melancholy, of doubt, 
of timidity here, but the inspiring breath of one of the 
greatest of truths. The apostle stands by the un- 
fathomable chasm of the tomb, into which for ages 
the race has been vanishing with not a whisper to tell 
of what is beyond, or if there be any beyond at all ; 
he looks into the impenetrable dark, that darkness 
which has swallowed up so many brave and beautiful 
souls, which seems to swallow in its dumb abyss not 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 289 

only all souls, but the very worth and dignity of the 
soul itself; and when the trembling cry comes from 
his companion, "O Paul, is there any hope?" his 
answer comes back clear, firm, like the blast of God's 
trumpet — " Hope ? Yes, hope in abundance; an eternal 
hope: Now is Christ risen from the dead — as in 
Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made 
alive. The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall 
be raised incorruptible — for this corruptible must put 
on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immor- 
tality." That, I say, is the voice of hope. Over the 
broken tomb in the garden, then, we are to read in 
letters of gold, one word, hope ; in the sweet light of 
the Easter morn we are to see shining that one word, 
hope; in the accents of the angels, "he is not here; 
he is risen," we are to hear but one word, hope/ That 
is the Easter message; the Easter idea. 

And, now, ever since the stone was rolled away 
from the tomb on that first Easter morn, a flood of 
light has been pouring from that open sepulchre upon 
the world. First it streamed upon Mary Magdalene, 
and lit up her trembling soul. Then it fell upon 
others of the weeping women, and turned their despair 
into triumph. It rose higher ; it filled the apostolic 
band, the little company of the disciples. It poured 
out on the world; the darkness that hung like a pall 
on the Roman Empire fled before it. Into the wide 
human heart, suffocating with despair in that long 
night of decaying courage and dying faith, was born 
a wonderful hope. From the wrecks of ancient great- 
19 



29O SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

ness came the sigh of the race, " If a man die, shall he 
live again ? " and then out of Joseph's tomb came the 
answer which made the decrepit nations young again, 
" Because I live, ye shall live also." And so through 
all the Christian centuries the light of that hope has 
gone steadily shining till men have almost lost the 
power to conceive what the darkness was before Christ 
died and rose again. How hard it is for us, who were 
born and bred in this hope, to realize its brightness. 

This hope is not a part of the nature of things. It 
is the light which Christ brought with him from the 
grave. Close the tomb of Joseph, efface from history 
the events of that first Easter morn, and night will set- 
tle again in the human heart. Do you ask what it is 
a hope of? I answer, it is a hope of two things com- 
bined, of life forever, and that forever a growing into 
Christ's perfection. We must never, as we stand be- 
fore the open tomb on the Easter morn, let these two 
be separated. Men are always trying to satisfy them- 
selves with the one without the other. At one time 
they emphasize the truth that we are immortal; as 
though any immortality would be blessedness. But 
how unreasonable that is: to live forever growing 
worse, farther from God — more hopeless, more unlov- 
ing — that would not be a boon. It was not such an 
immortality that Christ brought to light when he rose 
from the grave. 

On the other hand, men have urged that the true 
blessedness brought to light by Christ is the blessed- 
ness of goodness, and that to insist upon adding to 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 2CjI 

this immortality is mere selfishness. But that, too, is 
only a diseased fancy. What is goodness that dies in 
sixty years ? What is the worth of this ephemeral 
virtue which goes out like a candle at the puff of 
death? Christ did not die and rise again that we 
should be good, and then presently be nothing. He 
rose to knit us in goodness to him forever : " Because 
I live, ye shall live also." He died and rose again 
that we might live with him an eternal life, an eternal 
life of goodness. It is true that the great end of 
Christianity is to make men holy, but it is that they 
may be holy and happy forever. As has been said, 
" Virtue is its own reward; but that reward is eternal." 



LONG PRAYERS. 

It is not so much the length as it is the emptiness 
and weakness of public prayers that wearies. Ex- 
cluding such protracted petitions as have long since 
gone out of use, and to abuse which is only to lash a 
dead carcass, I affirm that the tedium of any prayer 
we hear now is from its quality, not its quantity. 
Some men are always getting ready, and never reach 
their prayer. Some do not pray, but only preach. 
Others get through their real prayer, but do not know 
it, and go on repeating a form of words. But when- 
ever a pious soul with ordinary gifts has a burden and 
prays it out, and then stops, he will edify, and his 
prayer prove no weariness, be it long or short. 



292 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

THE PASTOR'S COURAGE. 

If we loved men more, we would not be so afraid of 
them. What dull, impoverished souls sit under our 
ministry! Let us be frank in looking this fact in the 
face; how narrow, how cheap, is the Christianity of 
men, with its contracted scope, its selfish idea of salva- 
tion, with its sickly fears, its bigotries and jealousies, 
its poor vision of life. That is one side, but without the 
other it is only a half-truth, in effect a falsehood: the 
Christianity of the men before us is narrow and cheap, 
but how rich and full it may be ! 

Men are capable of seeing and feeling and embrac- 
ing the grandeur and joy of living, not for themselves, 
but for him that loved them, and for the souls he has 
redeemed. If it were not so, what a barren, heart- 
sickening work would this Christian ministry of ours 
be! 

There are those divine possibilities, in the souls to 
which we minister, of sacrifice for Christ and his king- 
dom. But we fear to show men what they are in 
their selfishness, and what they may become in a 
Christian generosity and self-denial, lest they may be 
offended. 



CHRISTIAN IDEALISM. 

Every man to be a successful helper of men must 
be an idealist. He must be able to look through the 
integument of the mean outside, the triviality, the dull- 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 293 

ness, the shabby daily living, to the soul that lies 
stupefied within. He must create that soul as it is to 
be, in his mind's eye, as the painter creates his picture 
from the poor model before him, before he puts it on 
canvas. He must bring out the real thing as God 
sees it. He must learn as Jesus did to see in the 
tricky Zaccheus "a son of Abraham" in his mean 
neighbor a child of God. 

And the way to do that is to live in that large 
atmosphere of heavenly communion which gives the 
power of heavenly insight. When we think of what 
Jesus saw in common men, and what we see in them; 
and 'then of what his fellowship and meditation were, 
and what our fellowship and meditation are, all the 
difficulties about working for base men are plain. 



CHRIST BOTH A PERSONAL SAVIOUR AND 
THE HEAD OF THE CHURCH. 

There is a portrait given us in the New Testament, 
the portrait of a divine life, a perfect human life, and 
at the same time a perfect expression of God. If you 
study that life, and approach it, and receive it into 
your own, it seems to me you cannot fail to have the 
correction of both the errors into which the Church 
is alternately falling. He is the Saviour of me per- 
sonally; I can know him and receive him. I must be 
personally by my own solitary faith united to him. 
There can be no truth or vitality in any religion with- 
out that. That secures forever from any excess of the 



294 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

churchly idea. I have seen him, I know him, I live 
by him; and without him personally mine I am noth- 
ing. He may be a great deal more; his life may go 
forth in other ways ; but this much is true, I am a 
Christian by my personal union with him. And that 
is universally essential. Let that be held and taught, 
and the idea of Christian fellowship goes at once out- 
side of my church; it is the death of all exclusion; it 
sets me at liberty to work and worship with any quan- 
tity of sects whose doctrinal system is imperfect, and 
even in many respects erroneous. And that keeps me 
from unduly magnifying the ordinances and sacra- 
ments and the. organic life that belong to the corporate 
body, the .Church. Then again it is the correction of 
the extreme into which the personal faith idea is so 
apt to run. For the Christ of the New Testament 
is something very much greater than my personal 
Saviour. He is the Head of the Church ; he stands 
in a deep, mysterious relation to the whole body of 
believers of all ages ; and his life is not only for me, it 
is for the whole body. It is something outside of me 
and outside of all existing Christians. It is a vast 
complex, with its members, and orders, and ministries, 
and its pervading life, into which I am taken up and 
used. 

I do not believe we shall find any other reconcilia- 
tion of these opposite extremes of Christianity. One 
way to solve the problem is to drop out one of the 
factors; you may say the Church is everything; or 
you may say the individual is everything. But that is 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 2Q$ 

only giving up the problem. Christ is for me, and he 
is for the Church. He died for me, and he died for 
the Church. And if I drop out either idea, I have 
mutilated Christianity. 



THE WORLD FOR WHICH CHRIST DIED. 

We are always in danger of losing that broad view 
of the faith which marks the New Testament. It is so 
natural to be narrow; such a work of grace to have 
breadth of sympathy. We are continually slipping 
into contracted notions, shutting out the distant, the 
foreign, and making religion a comfortable nest in our 
parish, our synod, our church. But that is death: to 
settle down each into a snug little Zion of his own is 
to begin to decay. It is worse than death ; it is desert- 
ing duty and perverting the meaning of the faith. As 
soon as religion means only my peace and comfort 
and safety, I have corrupted it. 

The world, the world — not myself, not my church, 
not my denomination, but the great, crowded, suffer- 
ing, perishing world — it was for this Christ died. 

There is pain in the thought ; and there is joy. 
The pain is in feeling the weight of a great world lying 
in sin. What a burden, at times, it becomes; it haunts 
one; it oppresses one with the sense of the millions 
that are sinning, putting out the little light that is in 
them, suffering, and ever plunging downward. But 
there is a joy in it, too. It is the world for which 
Christ died. It is redeemed, and it is to be won back 



296 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

The light is in it that " lightens every man that cometh 
into the world." We ought to think of the world 
thus : as faith deepens and love burns, we will. We 
will look further abroad, where the finger of our 
Master is continually pointing us. 



THEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES. 

Perhaps if we could get away from the controversies 
of words, and strifes of party feeling, to the world of 
inner beliefs, which each good man cherishes, and in 
which is his real life, we should find that there these 
differences grew less and less ; that they were nearer 
the one to the other than the world saw them to be; 
nearer, it may be, than even they thought themselves 
to be. How much, when death comes to strip off the 
veils of life, of what men held for truth may they not 
then find that only the intellect held, the heart never 
accepted; how much that the understanding stumbled 
at and rejected, the heart really believed! Who can 
tell? 



THE DANGER OF FINE CHURCHES AND 
ELABORATE RITUALS. 

The danger is of losing the inward and spiritual in 
the outward and material. Let me put it more defi- 
nitely. Is there no peril that, coming to apprehend 
God habitually through the flaming glories of the 
painted window, under the sensuous excitement and 
ecstasy of the rolling chant, that praying through the 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 297 

inspiring forms of a majestic ritual and meditating on 
his character when possessed by the mysterious influ- 
ence of grand architectural forms and under a solemn 
religious light, so learning to depend on these sensu- 
ous veils and images for our approach to God, we shall 
gradually lose the power of a spiritual access, the 
sense of his divine presence with us face to face? A 
religion of times and seasons, of holy places and sacred 
enclosures — this is what we have to dread. It is 
dangerous to make the house of God so holy and 
awful that all other places seem by comparison only 
profane and desecrated. It is dangerous to pray so 
habitually under the inspiration of the solemn and 
awful imagery and shadow of the church, that the 
closet, the wayside, are dull and empty of the divine 
presence. 

No one, I take it, of even moderately impressible 
mind, can enter into a grand and solemn pile, where 
the religious atmosphere prevails, and not feel how 
powerful is the aid it gives to the religious temper. 
Thoughts of devotion, snatches of praise and prayer, 
go mingled from the -heart heavenward; but it is a 
dangerous inspiration. " Darkness and mystery; con- 
fused recesses of building; artificial light employed in 
small quantity, but maintained with a constancy which 
seems to give it a kind of sacredness; preciousness of 
material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye ; close 
air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odor associated 
only with the religious services; solemn music and 
tangible idols or images having popular legends 



298 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

attached to them — these are the stage properties of 
superstition, which have been from the beginning of 
the world, and must be to the end of it, employed by 
all nations, whether openly savage or nominally civil- 
ized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of 
apprehending the true nature of Deity." 

An awe these things do produce; but it is "a false 
awe." A thrill and glow proceed from them that 
seem the very sign and presence of higher faith, a 
more intense religious experience; but it is only the 
thrill and glow of a perilous stimulant. So the wine- 
drinker feels his heart burn and his spirit rise within 
him ; so come the heavenly calm, the rapturous visions 
of the opium-eater ; but they are only the preludes to 
decay and death. 



HOLINESS. 

What is that quality ? What is the fibre without 
which there can be no holiness ; which, when we scru- 
tinize a godly life, is the one thing that remains though 
all else goes? It is the quality of righteousness — the 
love and choice of what is pure and true and just. 
Where that is, is holiness; where that is not, holiness 
cannot be. 

We are always in danger of losing sight of this es- 
sential quality of the divine life, that its substance is 
righteousness. We are always substituting something 
else for it, and thinking that this something else will 
do. One man thinks enthusiasm and zeal will do; 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 299 

and because he is full of fire and energy, and untiring 
in religious labors, it seems to him he must be holy. 
Another thinks strong feeling will do ; and raptures 
and thrills take the place of purity, honesty, truth. It 
is hard not to believe that the great preacher, eloquent, 
ardent, with deep thoughts of God, with powerful sym- 
pathies that melt and move masses of men, is therefore 
a deeply holy man; his burning words, his rich doc- 
trine, his power to sway and persuade men, we say, 
are the very substance of the divine life. But they 
are not. If he is holy, his holiness is not in his speech, 
nor in his labors, nor in his zeal, but in his righteous- 
ness ; the meek, humble, loving, Christ-like temper of 
the soul. We have the words of an Apostle for this, 
or we would hardly believe it : " Though I have the 
gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all 
knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I 
could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am 
nothing-." 



TRUE GLORYING. 

This raises the question, Is it wrong to glory? 
And to this we answer, at once, no. The sense of 
something high and vast before one, the throb of hope 
and joy that comes with the glimpse of a world and a 
life just unfolding full of wonder, full of power — this, 
that we call glorying, is not wrong. It is wrong to 
glory in low things when high are offered. It is wrong 
to go down into the mire when one may mount up 



300 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

into the heavens. But to glory is all right A man 
cannot be fully a man who does not glory. But in 
what shall we take this pride ? 

There is something organ-like in the grand slow 
passage in that melodious old prophet Jeremiah, in 
which he gives an answer to our question: 

"Let him that glorieth glory in this, that he under- 
standeth and knoweth me, that I am tJie Lord who 
exercise loving kindness, judgment and righteousness in 
the earth; for in these things I delight." 

That conception of the righteous Lord appealed to 
the old Hebrew mind more powerfully than it has ever 
done to any other. But even we, of these prosaic and 
commonplace days, can feel it. What a sublime 
vision it sets before us ! 



THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF LUTH- 
ERAN DOCTRINE. 

The real distinction of Lutheranism, as a practical 
system of truth, is its declaration and strong emphasis 
of the doctrine of justification by faith, or the truth 
that salvation is not something to be wrought out, but 
a gift freely bestowed on all who will take it from 
Christ. 

The great Lutheran doctrine, is that men "are justi- 
fied gratuitously for Christ's sake through faith when 
they believe that they are received into favor ; and that 
their sins are remitted for the sake of Christ." 

This doctrine relieves the mind of the intolerable 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 3OI 

burden of working out its own acceptance with God; 
it divests duty of its oppressiveness, and substitutes 
for it the enthusiasm of love. 

In one word, then, Lutheranism distinctively is 
simply the childlike confidence of the believer in a 
saving God. It says : " I know whom I have be- 
lieved, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that 
which I have committed unto him against that day!' 



PREACHING. 

In the New Testament preaching and teaching are 
almost interchangeable terms : the very essence, the 
differential of Christian address, is its intention to in- 
struct, to impart knowledge for the purpose of chang- 
ing or directing life. Take Christ's sermons and those 
of his apostles, and how the thread of instruction, the 
imparting of divine knowledge, runs golden and shin- 
ing through them all ; they are full of the knowledge 
that persuades, knowledge that is to be built up into 
the life. And preachers of the gospel are to be such 
teachers. But how hard it is to preach doctrine, that 
is, to teach and to preach vitally; how far off our in- 
struction seems for the most part from the lives of the 
men and women before us. 



IMITATING CHRIST. 

What a treasure is the gift of one whom we can 
imitate and never be disappointed! We must imitate 
some one. Consciously or unconsciously, we are con- 



302 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

tinually transferring the traits of other lives to our 
own. We are instruments sounding each his own 
note, and also vibrating sympathetically to lives 
sounding out around us. The chord of one harp' 
vibrates, and then the next harp vibrates in unison 
with it. But one of the saddest disappointments of life 
is that we are continually finding our models fail. The 
sweet instrument we thought in perfect tune sounds a 
false note, and we can never trust it fully again. But 
here is one whose whole life we may listen to, from 
top to bottom in endless harmonies, and never a dis- 
cord, never a false note. We may trust it unre- 
servedly. "Holy, harmless, undefiled," Jesus lives 
before us, and, follow him from childhood to the last 
sigh on the cross, never shall that perfection fail us. 
It is a most precious quality in Christ, that among all 
the lives which first draw us by their sweetness, and 
then disappoint us by their weakness, his life comes 
close to us, sweet and pure and inspiring at the first, 
and sweeter, purer, more inspiring, to the very end. 
What peace it is to follow a life that never falters, 
never lets us feel the ache of incompleteness — to follow 
a star that never misleads, never grows dim, never 
sets. 

But there is more. It is inspiring to have a perfect 
model; but it is more inspiring to remember this 
truth about his perfection, that Christ is the picture of 
what God intends us to be. 

Jesus is a picture of what I am in God's idea of me. 
That seems incredible. When I think what I am in 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 303 

my discord, weakness, meanness, sin, it seems impossi- 
ble that this lovely, glorious being can really be my 
portrait. But so it is. Jesus is the portrait of myself 
as I shall be in heaven. 

What a grand aim is it to imitate Christ ! Men are 
forever going astray, making shipwrecks of their lives, 
because they take such poor aim for life. To be Pres- 
ident, to be a greater writer or speaker, to be popular, 
to be a shrewd, successful man of business, to be 
lapped in ease and comfort — what wretched aims! 
How contemptible, how petty they seem by this por- 
trait of ourselves, which Jesus shows as he stands be- 
fore us, and says, "Be like me; love me; follow me, 
and where I am ye shall be also ; as I am ye shall be 
too." 

There comes a time, I think, when the old features 
start out, or steal out, be it suddenly or gradually, in- 
to the very image of our perfect Saviour. Then we 
have his picture in our hearts; then it goes on from 
one glory to another. It grows on us till there is only 
one face, one model, one friend for us in all the uni- 
verse. And then to imitate him, to be like him, is the 
one business of life worth living for. So St. Paul 
thought when he said, " This one thing I do . . .1 
press towards the mark .... that I may know him 
and the power of his resurrection ... I follow after, 
if that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus 
laid hold of me." 

That is the true imitation of Christ. 



3O4 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

THE TREATMENT OF NEW CONVERTS. 

The thing to be done after a revival or spiritual, 
awakening is to turn your new force on the work of 
the kingdom. Just to turn your new converts loose 
into the congregation is like letting your water pour 
over a dam. It will soon all be gone, and only leave 
your dam the worse for the wear. What you want is 
a channel by which you can get it to work ; a prayer- 
meeting, a Bible meeting, a Missionary Society, a 
Young People's Meeting, where the new energy and 
love shall find an expression and a discipline ; that is 
what you want. Turn it into that channel, and you 
will save your converts from stiffening and petrifying, 
and turn their force into a positive power in the work 
of the kingdom. 

Two things we need — power from above, and the 
utilizing of what power comes to us. 



THOU SHALT LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS 
THYSELF. 

In nine cases out often men read Christ's command 
in this fashion, " Thou shall not harm thy neighbor!' 
That explains how unconsciously the whole plane of 
duty to our neighbor is pitched in a distinctly lower 
level than that set by Christ. We lower the aim and 
then down comes the practice. We expound "love 
thy neighbor" to mean, " Do not kill him, or rob him, 
or slander him; let him alone," and then we fall to 
criticising and repelling and disliking him. 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 305 

We have pitched the whole level of personal rela- 
tion too low. We have taken men as they are, and as 
we are, and never really believed there was any other 
feeling possible than that of drawing to what we natu- 
rally like and recoiling from what we naturally dislike. 
But the whole meaning of Christ and his life in us is 
that everything in us and our fellows is to be trans- 
lated into a higher key; that even our likes and dis- 
likes are to be transformed and shined upon till deeper 
colors are brought forth. 

The rising of that sun over the world of our life 
with men brings out the true colors there. In the 
gray of the morning before sunrise, everything seems 
gray and blank ; but the sun touches the hill-side and 
it starts into emerald, it kisses the stream and turns it 
to gold. It seems to me it is but a poor Christ we 
have found who only makes the far-off heaven glim- 
mer, but leaves the earth as dull and common-place as 
before. 



SERVANTS vs. FRIENDS. 

If you do not enjoy your religion supremely, it is 
your own fault. It is not because God has made it 
unenjoyable. If you feel, with reference to all its 
branches of service, its devotional duties, its charities, 
its restraints and labors, its communings with God, 
that these are rather irksome and dry, then, I tell you, 
it is because you are not on the highest plane of re- 
ligion. You are being religious as a servant of Christ, 
20 



306 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

and not as a friend. Now, I do not say you may not 
reach heaven as a servant. You may go all through 
a long life with your livery as a bearer of God's bur- 
dens, and come up to heaven's gate and knock, and 
God will take you in as only a servant ; though when 
you get there you must become a friend. But then 
you must take only a servant's portion here. If you 
will only look on God as a master, as a pattern to be 
aimed at, you cannot expect that high joy of which 
you read in the Bible and in history as the experience 
of holy men. Religion is all it professes to be ; it has 
springs of living joy that flow bright and refreshing 
and sufficient all through life, through sorrow • and 
misfortune, through sickness and poverty and human 
neglect; but then if you would drink of them, you 
must -climb up to where they burst out of the moun- 
tain top, and not dig yourself a muddy ditch in the 
valley. God can make life a joy when it is lived in 
him, and he will do it; but he does it by taking us 
into the arms of his love as friends ; he lifts us up to 
his side and crowns us with the joy of his com- 
munion; and yet we must acquiesce in this — we must 
go up higher, and cry, " Lord, I would be a friend, and 
no longer a man-servant," and Christ will open his 
arms, and say, " Henceforth I call you not servants, 
but I have called you friends." 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 307 

EASTER. 

There is something very piercing in the vision of 
the cross of Jesus; there is something marvellously 
inspiring in the spectacle of the risen Lord. What 
beams of hope they cast down into the dark shadows 
of earth ! What secrets of eternity they unfold to us ! 
It is good to warm our hearts in that sunshine ; it is 
grand to rise to those eternal prospects. But Christ 
has something better to give us at the cross, and in the 
garden by the empty tomb, than the mere luxury of 
feeling. For John at the cross he had a special 
solemn duty : " Behold, thy mother ; " and from that 
time John had a sacred ministry all his own to carry 
out. And for the mourners in the garden he had a 
work to do : " Go tell my brethren that they go into 
Galilee, and there shall they see me." And they went 
to do his bidding. 

Sometimes after the season of Easter has come and 
gone, and the solemn vision vanishes, and we go back 
to our usual life, it seems as though all our emotions 
and bright hopes had been only a dream. The vision 
fades, and we are just where we were before. Well, 
it is because we take only half of Christ's Easter mes- 
sage; the message of what he has done for us, our 
safety, hope and joy, and not the other half which tells 
us of what we are to do for him, of the ministry we 
owe to our fellow-men, for whom he died also, their 
safety, joy and hope. We cannot keep the half unless 
we take the whole. We cannot carry a Saviour as a 



308 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

secret joy in our hearts, our salvation, our eternal 
hope, our blessed life, unless we give him to the world. 
Do not think to keep him all to yourself. Do not 
shut your eyes to the outer world. Do not stop your 
ears to the cry of a lost world, that you may hear him 
speaking more sweetly within. 

The way, then, to keep the vision of Good Friday 
and of the Easter morn bright before us all the year, 
is to know Christ not only as our Saviour, but also as 
the Saviour of all men; to give ourselves to him, first 
that he may save us from our sins and fears and pov- 
erty of soul, and then that he may use us to save our 
fellow men from their sin and wretchedness. " He 
loved me," says the great apostle, " and gave himself 
for me." That was his first thought before the cross 
and the tomb ; the sweet personal bond that drew him 
to his Saviour's heart. And then, " I determined to 
know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him 
crucified. *.*■■! am debtor both to the wise and to 
the unwise. So much as in me is, I am ready to preach 
the gospel at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of 
the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto 
salvation." No wonder his vision of Good Friday and 
Easter never faded out. He kept the two parts of 
Christ's revelation to him ever before his soul. With 
one hand he grasped the cross and the risen Saviour, 
and with the other he beckoned to the world to come 
and see what a Saviour there was for them. 

Who will make his crucified Saviour, his risen Lord, 
a selfish luxury for his own soul alone? He is the 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 3O9 

Saviour of all men: can we ever think of him and for- 
get that? 

Let that thought shine out above the solemn cross 
we contemplate, wreathe with the flowers we hang 
about our altars in memory of the Easter morn, go 
with us to the communion table. " What have I done 
to bring Christ to men? What have I given for him 
who has given all for me? What have I denied my- 
self for him who died for me ?" And then go and coin 
the love and hope and penitence of the Easter time 
into the counters of a firm purpose, a self-denial, an 
earnest effort to bring Christ to the souls he loves. 



WHIT-SUNDAY. 

What, then, is the meaning of Whit-Sunday? The 
symbol of the day sums it all up. When the disciples 
were met in the upper room, there appeared tongues 
of fire upon every head. Light and heat, these are the 
symbols of the Holy Ghost, of God entering and pos- 
sessing the soul. They are more than symbols ; they 
are the very substance of what God does for us when 
we receive the blessed Spirit in his fullness. He illum- 
inates and he quickens. We see in his light; we live 
in his warm life. That is the whole of Pentecost. 

We shall never know what Christ really is till we 
have had our Pentecost The Holy Ghost must come 
within the soul and show him to us face to face; not 
the knowledge of right and wrong, of the pain of sin 
and the joy of goodness, but the knowledge of all 



3IO SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

these in the bright person of Christ. Indeed, we never 
know what God is in the blessedness of that knowl- 
edge, till the Holy Spirit gives us sight to see him in 
Christ. We have seen pictures in which the face of 
the principal figure was turned away. Christmas and 
Good Friday and Easter, by themselves, are just such 
pictures of God, with his face unseen. The form, the 
action, are there, but the face is hidden. Whit-Sunday 
shows us our Christmas and Good Friday and Easter 
with the face of Christ turned to us, all the features 
clear and strong and lovely. As an old divine has 
said " Christ is God made manifest, but the Holy 
Ghost is the eye with which we see this manifested 
God." 

We all know what it is to live by motives drawn 
merely from conscience and reason, and what it is to 
live by the warm flush of an inspiration. The disciples 
at Emmaus expressed it when they said, " Did not our 
hearts burn within us while he talked with us by the 
way ?" Truth glowed and melted as it fell into their 
souls; a divine impulse came with its touch; they 
could not let him who spoke so depart ; they clung to 
him. This was what the coming of the Holy Ghost 
meant. He brought Christ within. All the goodness 
they had admired and coldly copied, all the duty they 
had tried to do, and often fainted under its difficulty, 
was fused by that touch of flame into a glad loving 
impulse. 

What a world apart is the work we do, the sacrifice 
we make for right, and that we offer from love. Ser- 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 3 I I 

vice without love, how cold, how hard, how sad it is ! 
Our experience is often mirrored in that saying of 
the Christian to his pastor, "I know it is my duty 
because I hate it so." That tells of life which has had 
no Pentecost yet; a real, earnest, brave, true life — but 
so hard and sad, so cold and slow ! What we need is 
a fire to kindle our will towards God into a wish for 
him. Then instead of recognizing duty by the frown 
in its face we shall know it by its lovely smile. 

Who has not wished often that he could set a torch 
to his obedience and make it blaze into an inspiration? 
Well, Whit-Sunday is the bringing of that torch. 
What we are seeking is seeking us. Pentecost did for 
the disciples this very thing. It came to their cold- 
ness with fire. The Holy Ghost came to them. God 
entered their souls, and showed them Jesus, and when 
they saw him the light kindled into flame. I do not 
care to separate the two, or to tell how they are related. 
They cannot be separated any more than light and 
heat are separated in the great works of nature. To 
see Christ with the inward vision of the Holy Ghost; 
and to love him and, for his sake, all the duty he 
brings us to do; this is really one. 



THE READING OF THE BIBLE. 

There is such a thing as reading the Scriptures, not 
for doctrine, not for direction, not for texts, but for in- 
spiration and communion with God. Dr. Alexander, 
in one of his suggestive notes, speaks of the effect pro- 



312 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

duced on his mind by reading a whole book, an epistle, 
or a gospel, or a historical book, as rapidly as he could, 
not stopping to dwell on any point, to unravel any diffi- 
culty, but skimming over the surface, as a bird flies over 
the landscape, so as to get one wide view, a bird's eye 
view, so to speak. The effect was one of great inspi- 
ration. It was like looking on a great prospect from 
an eminence; the breadth, the light, the sweep of 
thought, filled the mind with high and uplifting emo- 
tions. To say nothing of the new vision one gets of a 
subject from taking it in all at once so as to catch the 
relations of all the parts, there is an effect produced 
from a long sustained contact with the mind of the 
Spirit caught in the continual survey of a great body 
of Scripture. It is like being in company with a lofty 
and noble nature for days ; one catches also the tone, 
the atmosphere. So, to read the Scripture in bulk, 
to bathe one's mind in them, as it were, is to come in 
contact with God, to catch his Spirit. And this is a 
true devotional reading. 

There is another way of devotional reading; it is to 
select a short passage, a promise, a pregnant state- 
ment of truth, a text, and then, after finding out by 
careful study what it means literally, to take it into 
the mind and let it lie there, to meditate on it, to let it 
germinate, fructify, and so unfold itself to the heart. 
If we combine the two, now reading microscopically, 
taking only a text, a paragraph ; and then with a wide, 
rapid sweep, bringing our mind quickly into contact 
with large bodies of the Word, as one gets the air 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 3I3 

when riding swiftly through the country, then we shall 
have the best of devotional reading. 

But there is no dispensing with continual and large 
contact with the body of Scripture. There is such a 
thing as being imbued with the mind of Scripture, not 
simply knowing its facts, being familiar with its doc- 
trines, ready in quoting texts, but a taking of its color, 
its tone, its spirit. For there is a spirit goes out from 
the sacred pages, these are the historical facts, these 
the great doctrines, these the line of development, 
these are the body.' You may have each one of these 
and miss the spirit, the direct touch of God, as it were, 
in the soul. 

For it is the revelation of himself; when we read 
his Word we not only get direction, but we may get 
him; and this is what we should seek to reach in our 
reading of the Scriptures — himself. 

We need to learn this use of Scripture, as a revela- 
tion of God, as a mirror of his face, as an atmosphere 
that gives spiritual ozone to the life. And he is most 
Biblical, the man of the Word, not who knows the 
most proof-texts, or has the best system of theology, 
or is most familiar with the geography and antiquities, 
or the original text, or who has the plan of salvation 
readiest at his tongue's end, but he who lives in the 
atmosphere of the Word, communing with God there, 
face to face. 

In one word, the Bible is a revelation not merely of 
doctrine about God and his salvation, but more pro- 
foundly still it is a 7'evelation of God himself. 



3I4 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

THE TRUE RULE OF CHRISTIAN PRACTICE. 

Paul would probably have been amazed could he 
have foreseen how slowly the great faith he was called 
to propagate would come to be understood and applied. 
Especially would it have aroused his wonder, we may 
suppose, could he have foreknown that certain rudi- 
mental and simple questions of Christian practice 
would be under discussion and unsettled to-day, just 
as they were in his day. The primitive church had 
differences about the eating of meat offered to idols; 
about the observance of special days — things in them- 
selves indifferent, but in the treatment of which there 
was involved a living and real question. 

The thing that is important for us to know and act 
upon, is not whether it is right or wrong to observe 
special days — whether an idol is anything or nothing. 
There is a deeper question involved. What is that? 

It is the question of love. You are disputing, Paul 
says to both parties, about the right or wrong of cer- 
tain practices. There is a right and a wrong in the 
matter, it is true; but it is a right and a wrong of a 
very trivial character; and it is, moreover, a question 
that differs according to each man's circumstances 
and enlightenment. There is no general law, covering 
all alike; each must decide for himself, and for him- 
self alone, and not for his neighbor. But you are for- 
getting a great law — the law of love — compared with 
which all these questions of meat, and herbs, and days, 
are mere chaff. It is of small importance whether you 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 3 I 5 

eat meat or herbs — whether you keep certain days or 
not; but that you should not break the law of love — 
that is everything. You that know that all meats are 
clean, and all days holy, you despise your weaker 
brother, who does not see so clearly as you. Nay; 
you go farther: you exercise your knowledge, care- 
less whether it leads your brother into an offence 
against his conscience or not. You are right to say 
all things are clean; but that right is nothing com- 
pared to the wrong you do in offending your brother's 
conscience and refusing to bear his weakness. 

And the same law of love applies to our modern 
questions of whether it be wrong to put a cross on 
a spire, to use a liturgy, or to have a reading-desk 
in a church. But there is another step in Paul's treat- 
ment of these questions, and that is too generally 
overlooked. It is right for the strong to give way to 
the weak, but the weak must understand why their 
scruples are yielded to. It is for their building up, 
The strong are to give way to them not because they 
are right, but because they are weak. Paul, while he 
plainly said to the one party, " Give way," said just as 
plainly to the other, " You are weak, and you are to 
have your way because you are weak." To leave any 
vagueness on that point would be a real wrong to a 
weak brother; for it would encourage him to hug his 
weakness, and to glory in it as the truth. 



316 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 



LUTHER. 

It is true that, after all that can be said to show why 
a great man affects his fellows as he does, there re- 
mains an unknown quantity, a daemonic force, so to 
speak, which is not to be detected or defined by any 
of our criticism — the original, individual quality of the 
man himself. The elemental force of a great man is 
in the last result always a mystery. But still, though 
we cannot discover the whole of the secret, something 
of it we can. 

Part of the secret, then, of the vast influence Luther 
exerted, is to be found in his completeness. He was 
all around a full, a complete man. Perhaps to some 
that will seem a very strange thing to say about him. 
In his energy, his fire, his torrent outbursts, he seems a 
chaotic creature, the very opposite of the round, com- 
pletely-proportioned man. But by completeness in a 
man we are not to understand polish, symmetry, 
rounded proportions; but the full equipmeut of the 
nature with all the great distinctive features of human- 
ity. It is in this respect that we say Luther was a 
marvelously complete man. He was myriad-sided, 
multiform, carrying in his one individuality all the 
great types and features of human nature, at the top 
of their power. 

It is of course impossible to show this in detail: we 
can only suggest its truth with reference to those great 
cardinal features which characterize human nature. A 
very obvious classification of this sort is that by which 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 317 

we distinguish men as emotional, intellectual, practical 
or active. Every man, we are accustomed to say, be- 
longs by his peculiar make to one of these classes: 
that is, he is predominantly a man of feeling, of 
thought, or of activity. To be a great man is to pos- 
sess, in an eminent degree, one or two of these quali- 
ties; rarely, indeed, do we find that even men who 
tower above their fellows unite them all harmoniously. 
We have only to call to mind Aristotle the unemo- 
tional, Plato the unpractical, Calvin with his cold side, 
and Wesley with his lack of intellectual grasp, to see 
how great a man may be and yet fall short of the 
greatest. In Luther we have the rare spectacle of a 
man sent into the world who was complete in his 
whole make. Emotionally, intellectually, practically, 
he was complete and justly proportioned. 



LUTHER'S REALIZING SENSE OF GOD'S 
NEARNESS. 

It was said of Luther that in society he would often 
drop his conversation with those near, and be silent; 
when questioned, he explained that he stopped to con- 
verse with God: so real and near was his heavenly 
Father to him. He had a great, living, hungering 
heart, which nothing but God could fill ; and after 
God he sought as a hunter seeks for game. When he 
found him he lived in him. Through all he says and 
does, that is continually present. When Luther speaks 
we seem to feel God close by ; his intense emotional 



3 18 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

life in the love and service of this unspeakable Friend 
makes of God a wonderful reality. It is this that en- 
abled him to grasp the heart of Europe of his day, and 
to hold it through all these centuries. 



THE REFORMATION. 

We all know what that dawning day was : it was 
the stepping forward of the race to a new vision of 
God, what he was, and how man could be at peace 
with him. Say what men may about the decay of 
faith, the one question which the race can never cease 
pondering and seeking an answer to, is, " what is God, 
how can we find him, be one with him?" Darkness 
and almost despair had settled in the minds of men 
because the only answer a corrupt church gave to that 
question was, " God is a stern ruler; his son, Jesus 
Christ, is an awful judge; only by enormous labors 
and sorrows can you approach and appease him." 
The name of God was a name of dread, the thought 
of Christ was a terrible thought of judgment. 

Then came the cheering shout of the Reformation 
breaking the gloom. " Not so," cried Luther, " God 
is our father; Christ is our elder brother, because one 
with us and for our salvation: it is not terrible tasks 
and sufferings that can make you at peace with your 
Maker; you have only one thing to do — to find God." 
And then the world listened for the magic word, 
" Have faith in God. Trust in him who gave his dear 
Son for your salvation, and you are one with him." 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 319 

Luther's doctrine, which was his only in the sense 
that he struck open the Bible and made men hear the 
Word of God so long forgotten, was that the soul 
finds God by faith ; that God has been seeking us, and 
we have only to fling ourselves into his arms, and 
trust and submit to him as the loving, forgiving, de- 
livering Father. He told men what God had taught 
him, that the just shall live by faith. And then, as 
they took in the great thought and looked up, what a 
revolution came over the universe! — courage, hope, 
sprang up in the human heart; the race began to 
resume its confidence in God. 



THE SALVATION OF THE PAGAN WORLD. 

The gift that will save the pagan world from its tem- 
poral evils is not money, nor manufacture, nor com- 
merce, but the religion of Christ which teaches men 
how to make the most of both worlds. Every Hindoo 
child trained up in the faith and practice of the gospel 
is one more step taken towards saving India from its 
terrible scourge of the famine years. And what is true 
of the India famine is true also of almost every other 
temporal evil. The heathen world groans under its 
curse of pestilence, poverty, misgovernment, oppres- 
sion, the slave trade, because it is heathen, ungodly. 
It is sin that breeds these almost infimite forms of 
misery. 

It is the least of all the blessings of our faith that it 
is profitable for the life that now is ; but it is profitable 



320 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

even to that. To introduce the gospel, is to introduce 
industry, thrift, temperance, forethought, prudence, and 
all the qualities that at last make such great calamities, 
as the famines and pestilences of the heathen world, 
next to impossible. 



OUR LIFE A DEBT. 

It will be a melancholy thing for us to remember 
life only as a long dream of self-gratification. To spend 
our means, respectably and tastefully it may be, on our- 
selves and families — to hoard up our savings that we 
may leave them a barren pile to our heirs — this is to 
disown our debts, to refuse our responsibilities, to per- 
vert our trust. " I should be ashamed of myself," said 
Bishop Butler to his secretary, " if I could leave ten 
thousand pounds behind me." 

Nothing in the New Testament can be plainer than 
this: "no man liveth to himself;" "ye are not your ozvn\ 
ye are bought with a price!' And the truer a man is, 
the more deeply he becomes a Christian, the more 
keenly and profoundly will he feel this : My life is a 
debt : my time is a debt : my knowledge, my property, 
all is a debt. So Paul, "lam a debtor both to the 
Greek and to the barbarian!' Not a debtor only be- 
cause of his apostleship to preach to the Gentiles: 
that is true; but deeper than that lies the sense in him 
that his gifts, intellectual, moral, spiritual, his vision of 
faith, his zeal and fire and joy, were all so many treas- 
ures committed to him in trust for others. Is the 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 321 

Gospel joy and peace to me? then I owe it to every 
man to bring it to him. Have I any peculiar know- 
ledge, ability to speak, to sway and rule men? this, too, 
is a debt I must discharge. 



THE NOBLEST DEATH. 

There is nothing nobler than to die in the flush and 
full swing of work— for the soldier to go from the bat- 
tle-shock, the minister from the pulpit, the missionary 
from reaping in the white harvest field — this is a 
worthy end of life. It tells us what a grand thing it 
is to live for Christ and man, what a great thing it is 
to die in service for them. It burns away the base- 
ness, the cowardice, and sloth, which creep so easily 
over our lives. It helps us to live better to see men 
die so: 

" Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, 
Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair, 
And what may quiet us in death so noble." 



THE BANE OF THEOLOGY. 

It has been the bane of theology that it has been 
too much built up on a merely intellectual basis, a 
foundation of ideas only. It has begun with a defini- 
tion of God, a mere abstraction of which we can have 
only a notional idea, but no real experience, and then 
it has gone on to spin its wonderful web out from that 
centre; that may be intensely interesting, but only in- 



322 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

tellectually, not with the interest of reality. And so 
theology, to the great masses of men, has been some- 
thing very dry. For men generally are not intellect- 
ual; that is, they do not care for ideas apart from life; 
truth in bodily form, in events and persons and be- 
havior, they do have an interest in, but not in truth as 
a mere abstraction, an idea. In short, they want real- 
ity, not ideas. 



CHRIST'S MINISTRY. 

Who can doubt that it was a pure, supreme delight 
to Jesus to minister? From the day in which he sat 
in the temple talking with the doctors and making 
them feel the wonder of his divine suggestions, to the 
last hour of his help to the suffering, what a stream of 
blessedness poured through his soul! Relieving pain, 
enlightening ignorance, soothing sorrow, inspiring 
courage, lighting up the flame of goodness in fallen 
souls — what a rich feast life must have been to him! 



GOOD FRIDAY. 

Perhaps we have separated our Good Friday too 
widely from the rest of the year. There is always the 
danger, in setting apart particular times for particular 
events, that we shut ip our remembrance of the event 
to that time. There are those who use the Lord's 
Day so : they make it a close chamber into which all 
the sacredness of holy things is shut up, instead of an 
open window through which the sweetness and sane- 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 323 

tity of the divine communion stream down into every 
day of the week. It would be a sad thing to concen- 
trate on Good Friday our deepest devotion, only when 
the season is over to see the vista of the year with no 
cross anywhere on the horizon. "The cross," says 
Cardinal Newman, " is the measure of all things." 
That, at least, it should be to the Christian. Let us 
use our Good Friday, then, to learn how to take this 
measure of things with us all the year. 

Let us think first of the cross as the expiation of 
our guilt; but let us not stop there. We must take 
the cross with us all the year, to carry the sense of 
God's love into our inmost hearts. For what we 
most need to feed the divine life within is a deepen- 
ing assurance that God does love us. We labor to 
convince ourselves that we love God, we examine 
our feelings, weigh our actions, and try to stir our- 
selves up to love him ; but love never comes so. No 
introspection, no stirring of ourselves up, no digging 
about the roots, will make our spiritual affections 
bloom. 

But there is another side to the cross. It tells of 
our fellowship with the divine suffering. The cross 
interprets, ennobles and hallows the pain of life, by 
showing us that it is a sharing in the divine suffering. 
" I," says the Apostle, " am crucified with Christ ;" 
that is, the suffering of his life has a fellowship with 
Christ's suffering on the cross. They were united by 
the bond of a common anguish, endured for one great 
and holy end. How often does St. Paul allude to his 



324 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

suffering with Christ; and what a different face does 
that thought put on sorrow; what an august, solemn, 
holy thing does it come to be, when in the pain we 
can say : " I know the fellowship of his suffering." 
Then sorrow becomes not the barren fellowship of a 
universal human anguish, leading to nothing; but the 
blessed communion of the divine life, suffering with 
Jesus, that with him we may triumph over sin and 
reign with him in his kingdom. 

I do not see how, unless we learn to suffer with the 
cross of Christ before us, we can ever escape from 
what is the worst fruit of pain, its absorption in self, 
its narrowness, its egotism. But Good Friday brings 
us before the cross, where suffering was taken volun- 
tarily to fulfil the will of God, to bless men. It 
teaches us the sacredness of all suffering that says 
lovingly, Thy will be done. It shows us the beauty of 
suffering that grows more tender to others as its own 
anguish increases. That was what Adolph Monod 
meant, when in the long months of agony before his 
death he used to say to his friends, " Cette vie crucifiee 
est la vie bienkeureuse" What, could that pain and 
weariness be a blessing? Yea, though a "crucified 
life" it could be a life of peace; indeed, the element of 
"blessedness" in it was just this sense that it was 
" crucified," a suffering with Christ. At one moment, 
seen from the point of view of the world, it was only 
a tossing sea whose billows were throbs of pain. 
Then the vision of Calvary broke over it, and the 
light from the cross lay like a path of glory over 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 325 

those restless waves, and the "crucified life" was, to 
him who apprehended the meaning of the cross, the 
blessed life. 



THE PHYSICAL TEST OF PRAYER.* 

Prof. Tyndall's test is a test of something else besides 
prayer: it probes the defect apparently inseparable 
from an exclusive devotion of the mind to the study of 
truths relating to physical phenomena. Stated ex- 
plicitly, it is something like this: The habit of mind at 
first necessary to the investigation of physical science, 
and afterwards fixed and intensified by this pursuit, is 
unfavorable to, and, when long exclusively cultivated, de- 
structive of the power of moral and spiritual perception. 
A scientific investigator is, quoad hoc, unfitted for the 
consideration, and incapable of admitting, the force of 
moral and spiritual principles. To this defect, in large 
measure, is to be assigned the else unaccountable in- 
tellectual revulsion of the scientific mind from the con- 
sideration of truths that will not be formulated under 
physical laws or by scientific methods. 

*Note. — The test referred to was to make a single ward or hospital 
the object of special prayer by the whole body of Christians for a fixed 
period of years, and then at the end of the period to compare the 
mortality with that of similar wards or hospitals, and note the differ- 
ence, if any. 



326 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

THE TRUE SOURCE OF POWER IN 
PREACHING. 

Times change and men with them; but the change 
is only superficial. Under all the mutations of fashions, 
dialects, political and social revolutions, the great 
strata of human feeling, conscience, spiritual and moral 
need, run unchanged and unchangeable. What 
touched the Jew and the Greek and the Roman when 
the first preachers of Christianity went abroad from 
Jerusalem, will touch men in America now. And if 
anything is written clearly in every page of the his- 
tory of the progress Christianity has made, it is this: 
Do not go to men with proofs of Christianity, but with 
the naked truths themselves ; do not preach about the 
doctrines of Christ, but preach Christ himself. The 
dogmatic system may lose edge and weight; but the 
facts of Christ's life and death, the doctrine of his Per- 
son and Spirit, and the relations he brings men into 
to another world, when urged with the simplicity of 
authority, may at any time touch the old springs of 
human nature that never fail. 

These elements of power are simply incalculable, 
because they have to do with what is most funda- 
mental, yet most imponderable, in man : the sympa- 
thetic, religious nature. Again and again have the 
philosophers ruled it out as non-existent, because not 
measurable and calculable; and again and again, after 
being ruled out, it has unmistakably asserted itself. It 
may lie inert through a slumbering generation, as in 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 327 

England before the Wesleyan revival ; it may be over- 
laid and buried, as in continental Europe before the 
Reformation ; it may be despised and counted out ot 
the real factors of civilization, as it is by the science of 
this generation: but when the time of need comes, one 
ardent soul speaks, the old story is rehearsed, and the 
sleeping awake, the buried comes out of its grave, the 
wisdom of philosophy is confounded by a resurrection 
that refuses to be measured or contained. 



THE NEW MORALITY OF TASTE. 

One thing is clear, that the new morality based on 
taste must differ from what we know by that name, 
by a total lack of the element of infinitude. It maybe 
practically efficient in procuring for man the lower 
orders of well-being, and it may afford a certain refined 
and even intense pleasure ; but when it has done its 
best it is still of the earth, earthy. What is the high 
end this scheme of conduct proposes ? Its utmost aim 
is to secure the well-being of the race for its existence 
on the earth, meaning by well-being, physical happiness, 
mental satisfaction, and the gratification of the sympa- 
thies in procuring physical happiness and mental sat- 
isfaction for the race reciprocally. That is its sum- 
minn bonwn, its highest ideal of moral perfection. 
Now we do not hesitate to say that this end, while not 
wholly ignoble, is of the very essence of earthliness, 
and wholly inadequate to satisfy the deepest craving 
of man even in his present imperfect and undeveloped 



328 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

state. It gives aim and motive enough to keep him 
going after a tread-mili fashion, and so would hunger, 
or dislike of physical pain. But it does not give scope 
enough to let us feel that life is worth all the fine talk 
the new philosophy makes about it. It goes out to 
each individual with his own life; it goes out for the 
race with the extinction of the earth. When looked 
at as a whole it is a beggarly, degrading ideal of life. 
In one word, it is finite ; and man shut in to the pres- 
ent state of things, never will feel any otherwise than 
that he is imprisoned. You may argue with him that 
human existence is only a prison, and that the best 
thing for the race is to make that prison as comforta- 
ble as possible till we are called out to execution ; but 
you will never get him to believe from the bottom of 
his soul that comfort is his highest good; not until 
that in him which makes him great and original and 
above nature is killed out. If the new morality could 
succeed in establishing itself, it would be by extir- 
pating one whole side of human nature, and that the 
greatest. It will get man to live by taste instead of 
by the Word of God when it has starved out of him 
all that is worth keeping alive, and not before. 

The trouble with this whole new system of ethics is 
the same that ailed the old Ptolemaic system of the 
universe, Geocentricism. As that made the earth the 
centre of all things, so this makes man the centre of 
his universe. It really degrades him by showing him 
nothing higher than himself. A universe of persons 
with no Being who worthily commands the reverence 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 329 

and obedience of all is a chaotic, inadequate universe to 
such a creature as man. Accordingly here come in 
the modern substitutes for God, the Positivists' " Wor- 
ship of Humanity," the Agnostics' cult of "Altruism:" 
we are to adore humanity in its essence ; we are to 
live for the race. But to adore humanity is only to 
worship myself multiplied indefinitely; and to live for 
the race, if there be no one above us of whom man is 
the image and child, is only to live for myself repeated 
over and over. Now the business of living for a mul- 
tiplied self may be arithmetically worthy, but it is hard 
to see how it can be so morally. Multiply man as 
many million times as you please, and you only get 
so many millions of men, not a sublimated, apotheo- 
sized something that is different in kind from the indi- 
vidual. So that, after all, the dignity of living for the 
race, if that race has no God and Father, is only the 
dignity of living for one's self contemplated in a mag- 
nifying mirror. If it is base to live for the happiness 
of one man, because that one is myself, it can not be 
noble to live for the happiness of a million men, who 
are only myself reduplicated indefinitely. 



"THY WILL BE DONE." 

How true it is that the practical use of this petition 
of the Lord's Prayer is confined almost exclusively to 
its passive side. When we ask for that holy will to 
be done, we are apt to mean that we should suffer 
it patiently. But how full the Bible is of fingers that 



330 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

point us to the active side. When St. Paul is talking 
to the Thessalonians concerning their personal purity 
and honesty he tells them "this is the will of God, 
even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from 
fornication:" the active side is plain enough there. 
And then to the Romans he writes, urging them not 
to be conformed to the world, but by a transformation 
to give a practical exhibition of religion by a spiritual 
life, to prove the "good and acceptable and perfect will 
of God!' And there, too, it is something to be done, 
something wrought out in the active life by the co- 
operation of men and God, that is meant by God's 
will. Perhaps it is the strong light thrown on the 
passive side of this petition by Christ's own use of it 
in his agony in the garden that has given so many 
minds this one-sided bias. We hear him pray, " Thy 
will be done ;" we see him submit to drink the cup — 
and the powerful vision burns it on our minds that 
the Father's will is something to be borne rather than 
something to be done. But if we think for a moment 
we will remember that those hours of submission in 
the garden and on the cross were only passages of 
suffering let into a rich, full, active life, the burden of 
which was the doing of the Father's will. His own 
words teach us that : " My meat is to do the will of 
him that sent me, and to finish his work." To live 
the life of obedience, to teach, to heal, to reveal God 
to men, and in it all to suffer, and by suffering to 
learn a more perfect obedience to the will of his 
Father — this was Christ's reading of his own petition 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 33 I 

that the will of God be done. The great thing was 
the active doing of the Divine will, and to that suffer- 
ing was only incidental ; it came in as the chafing and 
breaking of the stream on the opposing rocks come 
in to the stream's progress ; but the life of the stream 
is not that broken passage, but the movement through 
that and beyond. 

And what was truth for him is truth, too, for us : 
we suffer his will only that we may come more per- 
fectly to do that will ; even as Christ suffered on the 
cross, that he might perfectly work out the Father's 
will that all might be saved. 



PROVINCIALISM. 

A man may be penetrated with the spirit of his own 
times, may have ceased to be provincial as regards 
place or nation ; but may yet be provincial in his un- 
acquaintance with other ages. He may be a skillful 
man of affairs, a keen reasoner, but he is for all that 
provincial. There is one side of culture that is not to 
be worked out, nor reasoned out; it comes to a man, 
it possesses him. It is the effect produced by viewing 
life and its questions, art, literature, religion, society, 
from many points of vision. And there is no other 
way of multiplying one's points of vision than by 
looking through other men's eyes, yielding up our 
natural habit of thought for the time being, and taking 
the stand of other ages. If I would get the look that 
life and its problems had to the Roman, I must stand 



332 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

where the Roman stood and look on it through his 
eyes. And what other way is there for me to get by 
his side and to see things as they looked to him, but 
by studying his literature and history, and these, too, 
as they were to him, not as a modern writer repro- 
duces or describes them. In short, there is no other 
way of knowing how other races and ages of human 
beings thought and felt but by steeping ourselves in 
their atmosphere, that is, in their history and literature. 
If we do that, if we take our stand by the Roman 
and see with his eyes, in so far we escape from oui 
natural provincialism, and receive a culture that is 
wholly unique of its kind. So, in proportion as age 
after age, through its literature, its art, its religion, its 
social life, is brought home to our familiar apprehen- 
sion, this broadening process is carried on, and little 
by little the provincial habit is eradicated. 



THE HIGHER EDUCATION WITHOUT GOD. 

The higher education has no room for so primary a 
work on morals as the Bible. Then it must confront 
the problem alone. Here is the " natural man;" he is 
still vicious, unaccountably fond of vile ways, with a 
real love for rascality, unamenable to reason, un- 
changeable by any kind of government or educational 
manipulation. All sorts of polities, social atmospheres, 
sanitary measures, educational remedies, have been ap- 
plied to him, and nothing has ever done him any good, 
but religion. Even that has not restrained him much, 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 333 

but yet it has restrained. He changes his plan of 
operations, he transforms his outward appearance, but 
at bottom, in his heart, he is the same natural man. 
He is no longer a soulless Greek, given over to un- 
natural vices. He has got over his ferocious carnivo- 
rous mood, when he was a Roman. He is no free- 
booting baron of the Middle Ages. He does not drink 
himself under the table every night, after the style of 
Queen Anne's age. But here he is, the same inwardly 
bad fellow. He appears in all sorts of shapes : we all 
have something of him in us. 

The whole theory of regenerating man by education 
is based on the assumption, that what cures a bad dis- 
position is light. One is tempted here to repeat what 
the great Master of morals, of conduct, said about the 
effect of light on man's bad disposition — that the trou- 
ble with men was not that they had not light, but that 
when light came they did not want it, that they re- 
fused it, and fought against it. But no amount of 
information, of breadth of view, of training of the rea- 
soning powers, and of the faculties of taste, is going 
to have the slightest effect by itself on man's conduct. 
For that is wrong not by defect of knowledge, or nar- 
rowness of outlook, or weakness of the logical faculty, 
or faultiness of the eye or ear; but by a positive qual- 
ity. It is a positive force that will go after what it 
wants. And when the pagan poet said, " I see the 
better but the worse pursue," he described just the 
case we have to deal with — that of a being who goes 
wrong when he has plenty of light, who goes wrong 



334 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

because he has a force in him that nerves itself, that 
chooses to defy what is right. 

It has been so over and over again in the history of 
the world. Men have had a fair start again and again ; 
and again and again they have, despite all the siLperior 
education afforded them, gone steadily down. They 
have had it in Egypt, in Greece, in Rome, in every 
great country in Europe. And always an unaccount- 
able element showed itself, a vicious element, and in 
spite of all efforts it conquered every time. Nothing 
yet has ever eliminated it : reverse the terms, put them 
how you will, there the bad quantity appears, not a 
negative, but a pressing, positive quantity ; a quality 
that bites-in, that eats through everything, national 
character, literary culture, refined taste, primitive sim- 
plicity, inherited virtues. 



THEOLOGY. 

Theology is the bridge that spans the gulf between 
heaven and earth; but it must plant a pier on either 
side. It springs from heaven on the one side ; but it 
must touch the earth on the other, or men will at last 
decline to go over it. The great trouble is that the- 
ology has been projecting itself in the air, failing to 
touch life; or touching it only so remotely, so ob- 
scurely, that men have found it hard to see the con- 
nection between the doctrine taught and the life to be 
lived. 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 335 

THE THREE DISTINCTIVELY LUTHERAN 
DOCTRINES. 

Among the Protestant churches the Lutheran has 
always been distinguished by three great lines of reli- 
gious thought related to and growing out of three 
doctrines emphasized, not so much in her creeds and 
confessions, as in the theological discussions of the 
Church. Those lines of thought are represented by 
the several doctrines oi Justification by Faith, Baptism, 
and the Lords Supper. 



LARGENESS OF STYLE. 

This is a vague expression. What, it will be said, 
is meant by "largeness" in such a connection? Well, 
perhaps it is not easy to define : but it may be possible 
to suggest a meaning. Apart from any sharply de- 
fined quality in a work of imagination or intellectual 
construction, as wit, or brilliancy, or acumen, or pro- 
fundity, we are sensible of a general atmosphere that 
belongs to the whole production. The writer, we say 
to ourselves, looks at things in a small way ; he sees 
only one side ; he is a pettifogger ; everything is be- 
littled under his treatment: or, on the other hand, we 
say, he has a broad outlook ; he sees things on a great 
scale; he takes us out into the open air and makes us 
feel the vastness of the great heavens and earth. This 
sort of atmosphere may be felt in a work that appar- 
ently admits of no great expansion of thought. Homer 



33§ SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

writes of the squabbles of the Greeks and Trojans and 
the absurd interferences of a very petty lot of celestials ; 
and yet he has this large tone. It broadens and lifts 
up one's sense of things to read him. Madame Dacier, 
his French translator, said that after reading the Iliad 
everything was magnified : the men she met on the 
street seemed ten feet high. The largeness is not in 
the subject, but in the treatment; and that we refer at 
last to the largeness in the man. Such is the effect 
produced by Bishop Butler. Whether he writes of 
Compassion or Self-Deceit, of Resentment or the Love 
of God, the subject broadens and deepens under his 
hand. A certain grandeur invests the thoughts as 
they arise. The greatness of God, the dignity of man, 
the sweetness and excellence of piety, the miseries of 
sin, all appear in a strangely impressive light: the old 
figures come before us as the figures of life came upon 
the Greek stage, uplifted, made heroic, with a great 
carriage, that overawes and expands the sensibilities. 
It is not that we are told anything new ; but the old 
truth in the larger utterance has the wonder and 
majesty of a fresh revelation. 



SCIENCE vs. THEOLOGY. 

Science fascinates the mind by its element of posi- 
tiveness ; and truly, apart from the matter of scientific 
discovery, its vast extension of the fields of knowledge, 
the mastery it gives man over nature, it is doing a 
great educating work on the intellect of the race in 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 337 

teaching it exactness, sincerity, love for reality. It is 
this new charm of apparent superior reality which is 
making it shine for the moment over its rival The- 
ology. We are all for the moment taken by the won- 
derful feat of being able to weigh the sun and tell the 
number of tons it turns in the scales ; it seems that to 
know how many millions of years it took to evolve the 
earth out of nebulous mist is vastly grander than to 
believe that " God created the heavens and the earth." 
It is the contrast of the sharply defined, the exact, 
with the mysterious, the dimly seen, the immeasurable. 
But that must pass. Its very charm, its positiveness, 
its clear cut, sharply defined outline of knowledge, be- 
comes after awhile a weariness, for it is a limitation. 
The eye loves a sharp outline, a clear bounded object; 
but it loves even more the depth of the limitless sky ; 
and the mind, after the definite bounds, the weights 
and measures of science, craves its boundless heaven, 
its depth of mystery fathomless, its infinite God. As 
Mr. Arnold says, " There are times when a reaction 
against religion and metaphysical discussion sets in, 
when an interest in physical science and the practical 
arts, is called an interest in things, and an interest in 
morals and religion is called an interest in words!' 



THE REALITY OF THEOLOGY. 

The cure for the disesteem into which Theology 
has fallen in the Church and out of the Church, is 
reality. By reality I mean the sense of positiveness, 
22 



33^ SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

of vitality, which comes to us when we find that a 
truth really affects our lives ; that it explains difficul- 
ties, throws light on the path, changes life, satisfies 
some need. Scientific thought makes a great deal of 
what 'it calls verification : i. e. the trial of a theory, a 
statement of truth, by experiment. Well, theology 
will get reality, and gather to itself the honor it once 
had, when it verifies itself, i. e. when it shows men that 
all its great truths are implicated in their common life. 



PASTORAL MANAGEMENT. 

If, as pastors, we can find something for every man 
to do, can mark out each one's place, and rouse an in- 
dividual interest in specific Christian work, we shall 
have no trouble in finding interested hearers. But 
simply to preach from Sunday to Sunday to a people, 
as one lectures to a lyceum, with no other immediate 
objective point than to say something fresh and stir- 
ring, is of all work the most depressing. It is no 
wonder that the modern minister is ever seeking some 
new place. There is nothing in the way of means that 
can freshen the pulpit like bringing it into direct con- 
tact with the cooperative work of the pews. The or- 
ganizing, administrative preacher, will never be dull to 
his co-laborers ; and his work with them, and through 
them, will most rapidly increase the number of those 
who, from an interest in the work of Christ, will find 
an interest in the word of Christ. 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 339 

THE COMMUNION SEASON. 

The sneer indulged by many at our communion 
season, that there believers rejoice, and weep, and are 
rilled with devout feeling, and then go back to their 
homes to plod on in the old way, is a very shallow 
sneer. It implies that all emotion is idle and false that 
does not issue in some palpable work. True, genuine 
religious emotion does arouse to greater religious ac- 
tivity ; but a certain measure, a very large measure, is 
expended simply in the act of love, of praise — worship 
and love are their own end. 

" Beauty is its own excuse for being;" 

and the outflow of love and worship to God is its own 
justification. It ends in him and completes itself in 
glorifying him. And so our solemn sacramental sea- 
sons are justified in their deep emotion, even as the 
praises of the heavenly host are justified, because they 
are paid to God. 



THE SCRIPTURAL METHOD OF SALVATION. 

The revelation of the Bible is not only to the effect 
that men are in danger of perishing, and that there is 
but a short time in which to save them, but also that 
there are elements which make the matter of haste in 
saving individuals not the first consideration. If we 
accept the position that the great thing about religion 
is to get the individual out of danger, at once then we 
immediately impugn the whole scheme of redemption 



340 SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS OF DR. STORK. 

as set forth in the Scriptures. It is there made plain 
enough that the immediate rescue of the individual 
from ruin is not the first consideration, for all the 
arrangements for the Gospel system are made with a 
deliberate and gradual preparation which to those who 
think only of the particular individuals must seem 
cold-blooded cruelty. Hundreds of years elapse be- 
tween the successive steps by which the race is 
brought nearer the revelation and work of the Re- 
deemer. Thousands of years roll away before the 
promise of salvation made on the threshold of Eden is 
fulfilled in the perfected salvation on Calvary. There 
are reasons then for doubting whether the matter of 
haste is so important in God's view as some others. 
From the slow processes by which he has unfolded 
his great redemption, we are led to infer that the sal- 
vation of men is not a work that can be done hurriedly. 
We are accustomed to say that time was requisite for 
the ripening of the redemptive work. St. Paul says 
that " when the fullness of the time was come, God 
sent forth his Son." Christ refuses to be hurried by 
his brethren to go up to Jerusalem, though they urge 
that if his message is really divine it ought to be pro- 
claimed at once: "My time," answers Christ to this 
plea for haste, " is not yet come." All this line of 
thought, rather, this plain drift of revelation, seems to 
point us to something like this, that in tha matter of 
salvation quickness is not so important as thorough- 
ness. There is such a thing as making so much of 
the mere rescue from peril as to cheapen and really 



SCATTERED THOUGHTS. 



341 



make worthless the salvation itself. What good is it 
to rescue a man from a burning house if to get him 
out you have to club him and so injure his brain that 
when out he is only a raging maniac ? You want to 
get him out of the flames a whole man, and he might 
as well burn to death as live a lunatic. 




